engineer

Aquila, I’ve been through a lot of the same hell that you are talking about. Depression can be a vicious cycle with the coping behavior feeding back to make it worse. For me it always comes done to taking charge and breaking out; this is very difficult when you don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning. The habit of daydreaming has been my biggest crutch; I can remember doing it since I was around five years old. It was a coping mechanism that helped me get through this world, but in the long run it just causes more trouble. Rand presented the evil of individual who refuse to think as a way of avoiding reality. Well I could never kill the thoughts, but I could prevent the actions by going into a world of daydreaming. It takes a great deal of self discipline to get over this, and only recently I have a truly abandoned this behavior. I can also relate to your obsession with video games, although my drug was programming. It is wonderful to be able to submerge yourself in a rational world with causality and standards; a world where hours of obsessive effort and rational thought can result in an absolute state of success. But as with the daydreaming, it is just an escape and can only make things worse as you withdraw from reality. Again I know how difficult it can be to get over these escapes, and I my self still battle these demons, but the reward is worth the fight. Reality is worth it.

The MS deal is like a drug dealier giving you a free hit; he just wants you addicted. I'll second that. When programmers write their own tools for their own use, you get quality applications. As opposed to when you force them to implement a committee designed, lowest denominator package for the masses. GNU/Linux has a steep learning curve, but you end up at a much higher peak.

To me it is like the difference between manual and auto transmissions. With an auto you gain convenience at the price of power. I’ve used MS Visual Studio enough to know how easy it makes normal cases, but how difficult it makes special cases. In VS you have to navigate through menu after menu hopping to find the one obscure options which will change compiling behavior; with GNU build systems I just edit a line in a Makefile. I understand that in some situations an IDE makes sense; when there are no special cases. But every time I try out a tool to sacrifice power for convenience it always comes back to bite me when I have to do something more.

I understand that its weird, especially at first, but after some time I can't imagine programming any other way. I find it painful to see inconsistent indentation in anything else I have to work on. There are several IDEs that support Python, but I don't think they are needed. The Python interpreter can run in interactive mode(read/eval/loop), and it becomes just like a shell. You have full access to the language, including all namespaces, and can import and dynamically reload the code you are working on to test it while coding. Debugging is instantaneous without any compile time pause. Plus IDEs are for the weak; anything that cannot be ran in a terminal is more distraction than tool. Anyone wish to fight over development tools?

I am going to disagree with everyone and select Python. It is a dynamically typed interpretive language with incredible object support (everything is an object), yet also allows for procedural programming without the need for a single class. Further its C API is beautiful, anyone looking to reuse existing code or working on efficiency crucial applications can still do the top level coding in Python. And of course there are libraries for everything from writing polling servers, to engineering calculations, to database APIs. --Tech Details-- The greatest part is that every single namespace is dynamic; they are just hash tables. You can modify classes, instances, and modules all at runtime. You can even access the execution frames and modify the global and local variables. This makes debugging incredibly easy. Finally the code is aesthetically pleasing; which counts for a lot when you have to see it for 10 hours a day. The syntax is like English, and indenting blocks is mandatory (no braces). Programming in Python is just good old fashion fun.