View Poll Results: Are you a professional programmer?

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Thread: Are you a professional programmer?

  1. #21
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    Quote Originally Posted by Salazaar View Post
    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.

  2. #22
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    Quote Originally Posted by wysota View Post
    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

  3. #23
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    Quote Originally Posted by Uwe View Post
    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!
    13 of September - Programmer Day

  4. #24
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    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.

  5. #25
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    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.
    Last edited by GreyGeek; 28th January 2008 at 14:07.

  6. #26
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    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.

  7. #27
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    Cool Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    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.

  8. #28
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    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.

  9. #29
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    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.
    Last edited by brent99; 21st July 2008 at 18:27.

  10. #30
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    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

  11. #31
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    Smile Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    Nop.
    I started programming in 1º year in university in 1994. I almost didn't know how to turn on a Pc when they gave C to drink. I spend long night hours doing stupid borland C ms-dos programs with the graphic library. Last university year spend the hole summer learning MFC from Visualc 6 with opengl to do a project that would show 3D graphics of electromagnetic waves. I now work as electrical engineer but I can't stop programming in free times. I also learn a little of php and mysql, but that doesn't satisfied me very much.

    Can you tell me why you program ? I program because I feel fascinated with dialogs and graphic aplicattions and with developing algorithms. I would some times feel frustated because in Microsotf MFC everything seems complicated. I found Qt in Web few months ago and I feel like Microsoft has been cheating me for a long time. With Qt I feel I will be able to unleash some kind of secret mighty power.
    That's my passion about programming.

  12. #32
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    I want to become professional programmer.
    Began as network administrator, then graduated from university and became engineer in electronics. Worked in science for several years - I tested IC-chips in radiation environments. Developed small utilities using different languages along that time. That utilities were intended only for my purposes and not for public, so they were rather ugly.
    And now I had enough of all this!
    Left my job and now I'm trying to find a pure programmer job.

  13. #33
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    Quote Originally Posted by john_god View Post
    Can you tell me why you program ?
    Solving (more or less) concrete problems, "building" things, optimizing complex algorithms as much as possible are the things that attract me most in programming.

    Now on for the killer features that make programming much more attractive than physics :

    • you're able to see the results of modifications a couple of seconds after making them
    • experimentation is a lot easier and significantly cheaper


    and also more attractive than mathematics :

    • nobody bothers you with continuity, everything is discrete
    • infinity sedom appears (I only faced it when considering the asymptotic behavior of algorithms in big-O notation)


    And of course there are bigger and more lively communities, which makes a hell of a difference.
    Current Qt projects : QCodeEdit, RotiDeCode

  14. #34
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    Quote Originally Posted by john_god View Post
    Can you tell me why you program ?
    Well, I've been interested in computers for a long time now, since the old days of the C64, when I started my "programming career" with BASIC. There are a few reasons why I program, one is that I want to know how stuff works. That is why I sometimes bother to deal with such low level stuff as C I never got accustomed to assembler, though, that's simply a border I don't want to cross Even plain C++ can get quite annoying, and I doubt I would use it if it wasn't for Qt. I'm more like the Java kind of guy. Yes, I want to know how stuff works, but no, in everyday life I can't be bothered with dealing with all those quirks of a computer that these low level languages expose to you Fortunately, Qt brings C++ quite close to Java, and Qt's native stuff is an added benefit compared to Java.

    I take the stand that a computer is a tool, and I like to be able to craft my tools into a shape that is most useful to me. So, the most important reason why I learned to program is to do so. If I have an itch to scratch that bothers me enough to spend the time to write an application/script/whatever, I do so. This, also, is the main reason why I use the software I'm using right now (Linux, KDE, Qt, to name the most important parts), as these enable me to solve my problems (more or less) easily, as they are open platforms that everybody can get involved with.

  15. #35
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    I'm a pro too. Indeed I'm at office desk right now :P
    My first program was a very simple test program in GWBASIC on an old Olivetti 286... around 20MB of memory... ahahah unbelievable nowdays! This was around 2002.
    Then I started high school specializating in 2006, and I got already the passion for that language that is C++.
    First GUI appl with Borland C++ Builder just 2 years ago... I don't remember what... maybe a CAD... but when I met Qt for work, then Borland became junk.
    Most of all, Qt helped me a lot to even better understand C++ itself: inheritance, virtual, templates and so on... and not to forget the powerfull of signal/slot system

    Why I program?? 'cause it makes me feel a god!
    You know, create, edit, destroy... that's your own perfect world, you decide what there has to happen and how! If there pops out a problem, your task is to solve that problem, and often this is quite exciting too! C'mon isn't great when you simply push a button and then pops out an answer that would require at least an hour to compute manually??
    It's absolutely great!
    --
    raccoon29

    "La mia vita finirà quando non vedrò più la gente ridere...non necessariamente alle mie battute "

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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    It is nice to see that there is such a high percentage of pros.

  17. #37
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    Hmm, semi-professional, I'd say. While I do earn some money by programming as a student assistant, it's not my real job, yet. But I'm on that way.

    I started at the age of 12 (or 13? 14?): My parents gave me an old Intel 286 computer that they got from who knows where and I played with it, teaching myself the basics of MS-DOS, batch files and so on. Then I found QBasic, studied the examples and quickly understood how programming works and created some simple programs. Later, a friend gave me a copy of Turbo Pascal and I learnt Pascal, then I progressed to Delphi with its object orientation and GUI stuff, and then to C++, OpenGL, shaders, Qt etc... Oh, and, of course, I designed complex levels with elaborate scripts for games like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Starcraft and Warcraft III. Ah, good old times.
    Last edited by sneg; 8th February 2009 at 03:13.

  18. #38
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    Quote Originally Posted by Raccoon29 View Post
    Why I program?? 'cause it makes me feel a god!
    You know, create, edit, destroy... that's your own perfect world, you decide what there has to happen and how! If there pops out a problem, your task is to solve that problem, and often this is quite exciting too! C'mon isn't great when you simply push a button and then pops out an answer that would require at least an hour to compute manually??
    It's absolutely great!
    Yes, It's absolutely great !!!

  19. #39
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    I have been programming professionally since 1996. Well before that I started programming in the early 80s when the commodore vic 20 came out. For the most part I have had very few weeks between then and now that I have spent less than 40 hours programming. I would estimate I have broken 1 million lines of code. With the bulk of this being the 500K+ lines of MFC I churned out in the day job before I found Qt. To this point I have written 30 to 35K lines of Qt with the bulk of the Qt code being produced in the last 3 months while working on a cross-platform application for Lung CT viewing and analysis..
    John

  20. #40
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    Default Re: Are you a professional programmer?

    I'm definitely not a professional programmer, I do it because I am a self-employed person and I program to suit my requirements. I've sold my creations in the past to others that saw and wanted what I had, but it's not my bread and butter.

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