Are you a professional programmer?

[wysota]

Originally Posted by Salazaar

It depends. If he's just a pure tester, who don't know what is programming, than no. If he tests software to find out what and how to (of course, he thinks about code) improve a feature, than yes.

There are different kinds of tests, like blackbox and whitebox testing. According to me both these ways require programming knowledge. Another thing is writing test cases - for unit testing I'd say it requires programming knowledge as well, although you don't even write a single line of code. For system testing it could be different...

No, he's just testing (non-programming things)

What do you mean by "just testing"?

What do you mean?

Trolltech support is the perfect case study of what I mean.

Yes, they are

Although they might have no knowledge of programming languages? It doesn't suit your definition too much. Either the definition is broken or these people are not developers. I'd say it's not that easy to come up with a complete definition of "programming" or "developing software", that's the reason I asked my question in the first place and I fully understand doubts people have when taking part in this poll.

[Uwe]

Originally Posted by wysota

I'd say it's not that easy to come up with a complete definition of "programming" or "developing software", that's the reason I asked my question in the first place and I fully understand doubts people have when taking part in this poll.

Isn't this poll simply about, if you are professional ( = get money for whatever you do with Qt), or if you use Qt in a hobby project ?
Of course this has nothing to do with the "quality" of your work,

Uwe

[Salazaar]

Originally Posted by Uwe

Isn't this poll simply about, if you are professional ( = get money for whatever you do with Qt), or if you use Qt in a hobby project ?
Of course this has nothing to do with the "quality" of your work,

Uwe

Yes, that's it!

[GreyGeek]

My first training in "coding" was plugging banana cords on on the IBM 402 patch panel to control which columns in the cards tallied with what totals. That was 1959.

My next training was in graduate school in 1968. I took a "Numerical Analysis" class and we used Fortran 64 to code four examples. It took the entire semester and even then some folks didn't get the four examples done. First, using a KSR-133 keyboard at 10 cps you punched holes in a yellow paper tape to encode the solution and the data. Then the tapes were sent off for batch processing on the CDC 6600 mainframe in another town. The results of the run were printed on greenbar paper. If the programming was valid your solution was printed out, otherwise you got a source listing showing where the errors were. ANY typos at any stage of the process required a complete re-punching of the yellow tape. Some never got past that first step on the first problem. At this time very few colleges or universities offered computer programming classes. There wasn't any curriculum nor were there degrees in the subject matter being offered. Folks were learning it as part of Physics or Math courses, like I did. COBOL had been invented only three years before.

My next programming experience was in 1978 when I bought an Apple ][+. I taught myself Apple BASIC and a few months later was asked to teach it to other teachers in teacher extension courses. I was teaching science and math at the time and the store from which I bought the Apple asked me to come on weekends and demo it. I did. Then I began programming solutions to a problems that customers were asking about. My first computer sale was a 48K Apple ][+ with two Disk ][ drives and a Panasonic monitor. The printer was a Centronics line printer. Total package" $5,000 in 1979 dollars. My share: $2,500. My monthly take home pay from teaching; $700. The tale began wagging the dog. There were several other languages that became available for the Apple and I learned them all: Pascal, Forth, Prolog, COBOL, ... Within a year I had sold several hundred thousand worth of Apples, and $360,000 worth of an artificial intelligence card for the Apple called "Saavy". My share on that card was about $100K, but I never got to see a dime of it. (That's a story for another time.)

So, I quit teaching and selling Apples and started full time computer consulting and teaching programming for the next 15 years. My last client was the NE Dept of Revenue. One month into a 3 month project they created a programming position and asked me to apply. My wife loved the idea because that meant I would be home on evenings and weekends, instead of spending 6-8 weeks at a stretch on a project out of state. I will retire in 5 months.

[GreyGeek]

Yes.

I began "programming" by plugging a back panel with banana wires on an IBM 402 tabulator in the fall of 1959, fresh out of HS, while attending the Barns School of Business to learn "programming".

Nine years later I learned Fortran 64 in grad school.

Ten years later, in 1978, I purchased the first Apple ][+ sold on the state of Nebraska and used Apple BASIC to write custom software for folks who purchased Apples. I quickly switched to Pascal. In 1980 I switched to writing applications on the IBM PC using SAVVY, then switched ot AREV, then to Visual BASIC 3.0, then to PowerBuilder (3.0 to 5.0), then to Visual FoxPro for 10 years, then to Qt/C++ three years ago. Between languages used to put bacon on the breakfast table I experimented with other languages like Pilot, Turtle, Prolog, Forth (I wrote an auto parts store application using ACE Forth on an RS Xenix platform - Forth is my all time favorite language. Too bad its dead.), Java, Python, Ruby, Haskell, D and some others.

I retire in 5 months and will probably never program again. Going out using Qt/C++ is a great note on which to end a career!


It seems an odd fact that programming as a profession rose and is falling in concert with my career in that field. If pundits are correct programming will no longer consist of assembling lines of code and compiling them. It will be using web based application generators like APEX. Thank God I'm getting out in time.

[TimButterfield]

I am a professional programmer in at least a couple of the definitions proffered. I have been getting paid to develop software for 20+ years. I am also quite good at it, being proficient in many languages/technologies. Unfortunately, my Qt usage to date has been only personal (I also program as a hobby) and not as a part of my paid work. I gues if I release some of my work, the third category may also apply.

[LeoVingi]

I prefer to call myself hobbyist , I know C&C++ and C# I didn’t yet use any of those languages professionally to write a project that can be used by others.
I just love to learn programming languages and I really love the C family of programming languages for some reason I m not sure about.
My first adventure in using some GUI framework for C++ was with MFC, I really liked MFC but lots of talking about MFC future and its easy to notice how MFC is old after using it for a while. so I learned C# trying to find easier way to write windows programs.
I m still improving my C# skills and the language is just huge the same apply to the BCL…
C# just good but it doesn’t match my criteria (portability, speed, popularity)…
Really using C++ makes me feel like pro!
So I did lots of research about many GUI class libraries for C++ out there, and I found that QT can be a better option than MFC.
Regards
Hatem.

[ad5xj]

I started programing on an Imsai 8080 home built computer. It was a crude form of Basic. That led to another programming job in basic and then to another in COBOL. This is an interesting long journey through the many flavors of basic, including Visual Basic and Real Basic (which I will not bore you with now). I am now a full time C++/Qt programmer.

You may note that I have never taken a class in programing nor any language yet I have been a professional programmer for 20+ years.

[brent99]

I was selected in elementary school (we're talking about 1980 here) to pilot a program introducing students to computers around the 4th grade. I remember being wowed that I could use the "?" for math "?4+3" would return 7 on an Apple, or something like that...

I would stay after school to write tiny basic programs. My brother and I eventually cajoled my grandmother to buy us a Vic 20 complete with a 20k memory adapter! I remember it costing something around $300. It came with a free plug-in copy of Radar Rat Race.

Not having a word processor, I wrote my own in BASIC around the 7th or 8th grade. I invented right justify, although my parents failed to patent it. My word processor worked fine but when you ran out of 20k memory, it would crash. You had to save bytes by using a '.' instead of a 0. I eventually typed in a popular machine language one from Run magazine. That was a fun day. I also won a programming contest sponsored by a college university that had a few thousand contestants in it. I went on to write a few simple Sprite games during high school, and I was involved in one local BBS system in Virginia that I ran on a friends computer.


I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in computer engineering and work as a software engineer in real-time/embedded systems programming. I've been hiding from GUI work for most of my 15 year career as programming GUIs for Windows suck. BUT...I started using QT early this year. Its easily the best GUI/C++ library I've ever used, and I've dabbled in just about everything at one time or another.

Being a professional isn't quite the party you imagine as a teenager, but its not all that bad either. For one, I got paid to post this message...haha. I spend nearly every day in front of a computer for hours and hours doing what often seems like an endless toil of problem solving and troubleshooting both at home and in the office. This has continued for about 25 years now. Its always funny to go into a job interview, get asked a couple oddball questions about some random programming language, and have the interviewer walk away having concluded that "I don't know much about computers..." lol.

[-=Freaky=-]

wow, lots of professionals here ...

i started programming when i was about 14 or 15, with c++ as my first programming language.
about a year ago i bought a qt book which was really cheap so i thought why not try it ... and i loved it instantly.

now i'm 17 and still going to school.
i wouldn't consider myself a "professional programmer", even though i make some money with programming as a "side job".

sincerely,
julian