My name is Peter Lager (aka Quark), welcome to my musings on computer programming.
My first experience of programming came when I was studying metallurgy at university. My year group was sent to the Computing Faculty to learn programming (just 2 weeks and included 2D arrays). The language was Algol, the computer a mainframe but we never got to see it. What we did get very familiar with were the IBM 80 column card punch machines. After university I joined British Steel Corporation as a metallurgist, but was soon spending half by time doing some real programming, first with Fortran and then BASIC, again on mainframe computers.
After 3 years at BSC I left with an addiction to programming. My first home computer was a Radio Shack Tandy TRS80 Model 1 followed by Commodore 64, an Amiga 500 and then a IBM PC . I programmed in Z80 Assembler, 6510 assembler and various dialects of BASIC. After a few career changes I arrived in Further Education (UK post 16 education) teaching students to program using BASIC, Delphi, Pascal, PHP and Java. While in FE I studied (part-time) for and was awarded an undergraduate degree in Computing. Eventually I became a Senior Lecturer at a local university where as well as writing software I taught C++, Java and OpenGL programming to undergraduate students studying computing and game software development.
I was first introduced to the Processing programming environment in December 2008 and since then I have created many libraries and tools for Processing, the most popular being G4P and G4P GUI Builder. I have also been a regular contributor to the Processing forum, helping novices to improve on their programming skills so they can demonstrate their creativity.
I believe that most Processing users are not computer science graduates (might be students) but are in fact self taught programmers. I plan to use this blog to provide detailed answers on some of the problems they are likely to encounter. I hope the posts will
- be easy to read and understand
- explain some of the vagaries of programming
- promote good programming practice by example
- help newbies understand the process of going from idea to code.
- be enjoyable