On 7/26/2014 5:58 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
I've to say, that learning D and contributing to D has greatly expanded
my programming horizons. I've been doing C/C++ for about 2 decades, and
about 8 years ago I felt I'd started to taper off in terms of learning
new things in programming. Until I found D, that is. D made hard /
complex things in C++ easy, and opened up new horizons -- like weak
purity, range-based component programming, new possibilities in
metaprogramming, etc..
Contributing to Phobos was also quite eye-opening in learning about
novel ways of handling common tasks in a standard library. I daresay I
learned more contributing to Phobos than from my full-time job (mainly C
with some C++ and a smattering of Javascript, PHP, and some other
stuff).
T
Sorry if this is too off-topic, please tell me if so. As I read the D
newsgroup I notice that a lot of you guys who are really quite
knowledgeable about languages are doing things like C programming as a
day job.
I recently (like 2 weeks ago) resigned my current job of over 10 years.
One of the reasons is that the work has veered too far from why I got
into this career in the first place. The code for the product, in C++,
has been largely finished (by me) so the only coding I do is small
modifications to it. Mostly what I do now is what follows that:
customizations for OEM customers, Windows installers, rebuilding the
product, testing, testing, certification testing. There are more issues,
but I'll spare you :-).
I do try to learn more about things like Haskell and D and
meta-programming and ranges, etc., but there isn't so much time when
your regular job takes up over 40 hours a week. With programming, I
feel like you can read about something but you can't really be
proficient at it until you use it hands-on and practice it regularly. So
I think it helps to try to find a job where you can do some of that
during work time. I hope to do that. But then I read here where a lot of
you guys have day jobs not even doing C++ but C programming, I feel like
some of you are in the same boat, and more so because you're more
knowledgeable than me.
So how do you feel about that?
Jim
