Many atime have I seen people come into this form with questions like "i want to make a game but i dont want to learn to program how do i do it please help me". the problem with technology these days is that people who are new expect people to do the work for them. why dont you just tell me what type of game you want, and ill make it for you. the same thing is going on with web design. geocities, tripod, etc: all you have to do is click click click and theres a web page, and a crappy one at that. All over the place I see people taking the short way out. A prime example is a fellow student in my high school AP C++ class. i was ragged on forever for making games (''specially by him) in visual basic. so i started in c++ and i actually like what has become of my game making knowledge, only to see him turn around and start using Game Maker. then once i tried to get him to use DirectX, he tries to use CMU graphics library (carnagie melon), and the fact that he cant get it to work is his excuse for not going out for the extra stretch in knowledge to actually learn something that will benefit them. in the on-level c++ class, they are paying other people to write their programs. why would you sign up for a class if you dont bother learning the stuff? some people, i believe, are in the programming for the glory, for the intellectual elitism they think they attain from calling themselves programmers, when in fact, they know little more, if any more knowledge than those they say they are better than. what im trying to say is, people need to get off their lazy american asses and try learning something, doing things for themselves. no more game makers, no more click click click web makers, no more autoback stratchers and hand holding that programmers think they deserve. Bragging rights are only called for when you have actually achieved something. If you take the initiative to do something yourself, it will be infinitely more satisfying. And thats my two cents. ---------------------- i code therefore i am. Aero DX - Coming to a bored Monitor near you!

I''m hoping that a lot of these people are underclassmen in school. I know for one, that a lot of freshmen at my school thought either
a. Computer science would be cool and just like messing around with their computers at home. or
b. Computer science had to do with building computers.

A lot of poeple thought it would be cool, but tons of them dropped out when they realized it was incredibly difficult.

As for paying people to do programs, that''s almost funny. Wait until they get to the hard conceptual classes, where programming is a relatively minor part of the course, yet understanding programming concepts is absilutely required. It will be fun to see how lost they are. Trust me.

I know a lot of guys who want everybody to think they are real hot shot programmers and they throw out all this jargon and fancy tech talk, but don''t even know that C++ has shift operators. They think they''re cool because they know &#106avascript, oooooooh. It is rewarding to know that you could code circles around these people though<img src="smile.gif" width=15 height=15 align=middle>

Heck yeah!
*checks time*.. hmm... 11.. brb
*yawns*
*goes to fill up coffee*

Ah, that''s one thing that i loved about the old days of programming.. you couldn''t get away with much if you have no idea what you are doing.. today you just call some functions and it slaps polygons on the screen and textures em for you.... unfortunately i was too young at that time to actually understand completely what was going on.. i had read the books but nothing made sense. Now i''ve been looking into PDA programming.. where you almost have to use the direct frame buffer access and write everything yourself.. ah......... my point, which i haven''t made at all, is that there''s gonna be posers in everything... and those fake programmers will never become noticed because they''ll never do anything...

Do not worry about those who take too much pride in their programming ability. The meek shall be seperated from the mighty when judgement day comes (when you try to get a job).

Do not be overly proud of your own programming ability, for somwhere, there shall always be some 1337 h4x0r with more skills than j0o.

I agree though some of the generalities are unfair. Those click and whatever webpage makers have their niche first of all, and can actually serve to teach anyone interested enough to start earnestly learning. Not to mention my aunt who made one didn''t really give a hoot about html but was able to do what she wanted with the tools available (and saved me some time...)

As for comp-sci students...while many are respectable most of the people (at least in boston at my school) seem to equate programming with chatting online and sitting in front of xbox instead of going to class. (And I quote on one suite door "Vice City and Halo are more important than class") I dont think I need to say anything further.

People like this have always been around. I remember working with somebody else on a game once. His contributions were little more than vague ideas about how the game should work overall and photocopies of stuff out of books about various weapons platforms. Nothing that I couldn''t do at a small incremental time cost compared to the effort I was going to put into programming the thing. So I stopped working with him and moved on to better things.

This was in 1989.

The real litmus test of a game programmer is finishing a shipping, commercial game.

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
Do not be overly proud of your own programming ability, for somwhere, there shall always be some 1337 h4x0r with more skills than j0o.

1337 h4x0r?? Most of them just know how to h4x (that''s quite a skill! ), or hack the way up until an application is made... many can''t actually really write industrial strength application.

i wouldnt call them programmers.

When we were young, ahh to be young, when you were actually motivated to learn things & ps was boring because you were too inexperienced to figured out the drift dynamics needed for original GT, when you found, for the first time, this little application in the main folder of your i486''s windows 3.11 installation called "qbasic".

You repeated it to yourself twice, even thrice and couldn’t figure out what that "q" was for, "isn’t there meant to be a ''u'' after it?" ... yes, QBasic was missing the YOU. That lonely icon, waiting to be discovered & explored.

You double clicked the icon making sure no one saw you in case you screwed up dad’s computer. You were used to DOS resolutions by this age so the blue screen didn’t startle you.

And we all remember the generic phrase which we recited in great awe as we ran our first example program "what the fuck?"

The rest, as we say my children, was elementary.

What does this have to do with anything ... well see only the intuitive ones would open it up; only the intuitive ones would find the help & run an example and only the intuitive ones would learn, and learn to learn... for life.

Programming isn’t a past time, it’s not even a job, it’s a discipline.
Life skills course? What’s with that? Programming sieves the real men and women from the minors.

There''s no need to overglorify programming, in its essence it is mathematics PERIOD

I really don''t understand al you that are getting stressed out.
There have and always will be slackers. There is no need to stress out about them, they''re harmless.

If a friend (or someone from class) asks me to code something for him, if I have time, I''ll sit down and TELL him how to do it, I won''t actually code anyyhing myself.

However if someone I don''t really know (i.e. I don''t care if he fails his class) offers to pay for me coding for him, I''ll do it. Look, they''re definitely not gonna end up programming for living but we probably will so we might as well start now!