Jason wrote:
> Now how many people still find coding exciting after doing it for a
> living, or learn new languages just for the hell of it? :D

> -- Jason


I have to admit that I seldom find it boring. Depending on what
it is that have to or want to do, I usually find enjoyment in it
somewhere along the way, and a fulfilling sense of satisfaction
when it's done. The satisfaction factor comes into play if it's
something larger, non-trivial. I don't think that I've ever
found coding exciting, except maybe for personal purposes.

I've learned some languages post-college. Almost entirely, these
have been completely self-taught. In one instance, I requested
and received some training (not in these budget times!). One other
time, a colleague held internal classes.

I cut my teeth on COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, Simula, RPG, and flavors
of assembly language. I loved the system call libraries available
for the DEC implemented languages running under (Open/?)VMS.
These days, I'm using a lot of Perl, SQL or PL/SQL (Oracle), regular
SQL (MySQL and Postgres), some snippets of shell scripts, and
some WinBatch on the Windows platform. I still fool around with Pascal
sometimes. I've been through C in the past, have explored Java
(don't like it because I hate the enforced capitalization conventions
that lead to many mistakes). Oh yes, I use Javascript sometimes for
the HTML for web apps, interspersed with the above.

I guess that I do not learn languages for the hell of it, but if I
think or know that I'll need it, I'll look into it.

When I first started in this line of work (almost two decades ago),
I did lots of programming at home, for the fun of it. Between
life's changes and requirements, and how things have changed in the
computing world, I seldom program outside of work these days.

Roy Zimmer----->OIT----->Library Stuff & Other things----->
Western Michigan University----->Kalamazoo, Michigan USA
localsystem=P3  ICBM=(%Fatal:GPS error 51)  RF=KB8UBA  AF="Hey you!" QRM!
[log in to unmask] you go, there you are!