Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Post here once you join, and tell us about yourself so we have a clue who we are talking to.
Keep threads short here -- once you have something to say, there's a topic here somplace where it will fit -- and if not, let me know and I will make subforums as necessary. We want all of hard science and tech up here, and if something doesn't fit -- that's my fault and I will fix that for you. See the rules and tips in the parent forum, please.
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This sub forum is for new menbers to announce themselves. Try not to create long threads here -- this is just for you to tell us who you are, and for us to say welcome. There are other forums to actually discuss real tech-science things here, and ask questions on. The idea hopefully is to have enough forums and subforums that nothing sci-tech related will be off-topic, there will be a place for it. If I missed something -- let me know, and I'll fix that.

Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Maxwell Nutter » Tue Jun 20, 2017 1:15 pm

Hello everyone!

My name is Max, and I'm a student in Tennessee. I found this forum after finding Doug's YouTube channel, which I've been watching in my free time. His homemade fusion reactor absolutely blew my mind when I first saw it, and I've been trying to learn more about it since then.

I grew up around computers, and have always loved working on and tinkering with them. I aspire to work in computer engineering when i'm older, and I am also interested in netsec. Other than that, I have always loved taking computers that people considered "old" or "broken" and restoring them to working order. I have fixed countless abandoned laptops and desktops. One of my current projects is getting a replacement monitor for an IBM 5150 that I picked up from an antique store.

I am also currently learning Python, but programming isn't one of my strongest skills. I definitely want to change that, though.

Other than computers, my second love has always been physical science. I've always been fascinated by astronomy and chemistry, and they're definitely some of my favorite subjects. I would also love to learn more about Doug's fusion reactor.

My other main hobbies include fencing and guitar (I love music in general, really.), but I try new things frequently. But this isn't a great thing, since I get frustrated for not practicing enough, haha. Other than that, I volunteer at a science museum in my free time, and have learned a lot from my time there.

I'm very excited to join this forum, and hope to learn a lot from my time here. Maybe in the future, I could even find ways to contribute. Thanks for having me!
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Re: Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Jun 20, 2017 1:40 pm

Nearly a neighbor, then. You should visit when you can, the bandwidth is better.
While python is the current fad for the kewl skids,,,there are other languages better for real mastery, though I don't think it's possible to know too much, as one of the things you wind up doing is looking at code from all over - how'd they do that - to add into your own language of choice.

I play a little, but no longer in public. We just pluck at the strings hoping for a pleasing sound and stuff like that.

I got lucky in that my Dad helped me learn engineering in the 5 tube radio days and bought me a surplus PDP8-S for a birthday. Never looked back.
(Those sucked, by the way, even though better than 8008 and pals when they came out, but it motivated me to put together a "Straight 8" which didn't suck).

We do have an old IBM mainframer here on the board, but he's usually too busy with raspberry pi's to post. He helps me sysadmin around here, good dude.

Welcome and have fun. New guys are limited to announce yourself and the playpen, where more or less anything goes (legal). The playpen clears out topics with no posts/views in around 20 days unless a mod makes it a sticky or moves it to one of the permanent parts of things here. The idea here is if the moderators like you, we promote you to full membership and the ability to post on parts of the board we consider "the book as written by the real pros".
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Maxwell Nutter » Tue Jun 20, 2017 4:22 pm

Sounds good! I'm excited to be a part of the community. If you have any tips regarding programming, or reading recommendations, I'd love to hear them sometime. Thanks.
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Re: Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Jun 20, 2017 5:12 pm

We do have some books and data reccies, but they are mostly physics stuff.
For programming, of course it's all language-specific, or maybe I should say "for coding" as programming and architecting are different skills hopefully often contained in the same person, but maybe not.

I like O'Reilly books for almost anything programming, personally, but then I like this weird language perl that's kinda out of favor just now.
Python is perl without all the good stuff and with stupid variable indentation whitespace for statement and block/scope delimiters so it can't work right easily in a stream (hint, one line edit boxes you can't paste a newline into). Ruby is perl without all the good stuff...and so on. There's not as much difference out there as you might think at first.

Most languages that start with J are abhorrent to adults but you wind up having to learn some anyway. You can take fads way too far.
Java is C++ with all the bad stuff only. (I'm sure that'll get some flames) Hello world needs objects, really? Oh, no pointers, it's all references, which are, under the hood, pointers...you just can't do good (or bad) things with them now. And a memory manage that runs when it damn well pleases and screws up any hard realtime stuff because they thought coders (and this is largely true, there are a lot of people who just shouldn't be coders) couldn't manage to control memory allocation and recovery on their own. But there's no argument that it's better to really understand lifetimes
of things and mange them properly yourself, and can do slow allocations and de allocations at times you don't have more important things to do.
Perl also has a builtin memory manager, but you can control when it runs...just by the scope of things.

Skip for now all the languages that have only tiny followings - if you're in the field they're overspecialized for, they might be fine, but...really
you could call gnuplot's command line stuff a language in that context (and it's damn complex). Plenty of weird to go around, go for the meat and potatoes stuff first if you can do that.

Eg skip R, forth, schema, lisp and a bunch of others at first. If you have a use they really fit, well then.

Most of the differences boil down to what do you do voluntarily and what's forced on you - and what the libraries do for you almost free. Rust true believers seem to think they can force good programming via strict rules. I await the proper time to laugh my ass off there, not that I don't like Rust. Or any other strict language. Thing is, once you develop taste (Ask Linus) and discipline, you can apply it yourself and don't have to follow some rules that may not make sense right now.

Some people can handle self-discipline, some not so much. As usual in anything else, those who can't try to force their rules on everyone rather than admit their own deficiency.

Bjarne Stroustrup wrote some really good stuff on C++.
Knuth will scare most problems just by threatening to take it off the shelf, but is largely not that relevant anymore.

Design patterns made us laugh as we'd been using some for years, and others were just dumb.
Ditto extreme programming. We did it, not write about it. Works for some, drives others crazy.

Fads are fads. Takes a little time to recognize them for what they are. There's usually one or two special cool things in a fad, but not really enough meat to be the whole game.

For me the best languages are the ones that let you define another language, more or less, and then write one slick sentence or paragraph in this new derived language that does what the program is about - far better than Vogon poetry, honest. And one hell of a lot easier to maintain a year
later when you forget what you were thinking. (if your language makes comments hard, it stinks as a language - use comments)

So, subroutines and in OO methods, are your new vocabulary for your special language and can have whatever depth of meaning you wish (you get better at deciding stuff like that as you go along). You can easily write object-oriented code in any language, we did the first DSP audio stuff in a plain C compiler for an oddball fast cheap floating point CPU. It's just discipline to keep your data defs and routines that do things with that data together, it's not magic.

And that's a thing. Perl has a fairly nasty rep as cowboys who like to do weird or obscure stuff to show their chops use it for that - it's so flexible you can write code that doesn't look like code - but it works even though almost no human can read it (see perl golf or any language's obfuscation competitions). So, don't do that. Any language actually gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot, after all - and so, as the doctor replied to "It hurts when I move my arm like this" - don't do that.

On the other hand, see CPAN. Almost every interesting problem is already solved for you there in "steal this code" form. Try that in almost any other language and it's around 10,000 times less. But that's my religion, it need not be yours. I just want to make all my other stuff work, and it's no longer much of a case of I have to do this in assembly so it'll fit in the time and space of a computer I can afford. So what if it's huge by comparison with what we did in a z80? If it works and I can move on to doing science, we're golden - but that's my use-case.

Once you tell me what language(s) trip your trigger I might be able to get more specific about reccies. I know our business spent many many thousands a year (tax deduction!) on books, and a few percent were actually good ones - even many from the cutout bins in the bookshops that used to exist. But it was by far the minority that were really good keepers. Can't completely blame the authors - it's a moving target.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Donovan Ready » Tue Jun 20, 2017 7:06 pm

Just an aside: I absolutely love R for what it can do. Unfortunately, I've almost forgotten how to use it now.

Me and a friend from Dunedin, South Island were writing some mapping routines to input a large dataset of earthquake magnitudes, depths, locations and times, and managed very quickly to get very nice-looking 3d projections and "movies" of the data. We got that right, so within a couple of months I forgot everything I'd learned about how the code worked.

I can still write COBOL, for God's sakes... :roll:

Welcome! :mrgreen:
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Re: Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Jun 20, 2017 7:17 pm

Donovan. COBOL! You even got the case right.
I wasn't trying to say that any language was really bad...well, maybe Java...especially considering who thinks they own it now (but stole SQl - crickets).
Just that some might be more useful for a beginner to find the ropes on, for more general purpose uses.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Donovan Ready » Tue Jun 20, 2017 7:31 pm

:lol: Like RPG II?

I'm showing my age, I fear..
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Re: Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Jun 20, 2017 7:45 pm

Poor Maxwell.

Donovan, I'm going to have to find a way to get David Knight on here. RPG indeed. When he was helping me here in person (on programming, we teach shooting/CCW together in another occupation a couple times a year) - you almost couldn't get him to use a GUI at all, and yes, he was an RPG guy along with other things.

Sh too, and every unix util you could name he memorized all the command line switches for - I can't do that - the guy's 76 YO, so yeah, you nailed your age.

However, I've only beaten Dave once in quick-draw in our informal yearly competition at the dueling post. I cheated and yelled "FREEZE" when the timer went off, and his Deputy Sheriff training put him on hold till he found the threat - and I'd totally killed the dueling post.
Of course that misuse of "the voice" isn't fair and probably wouldn't work again, but the man does have 13 years on me. And still kicks my butt.

He does pies and arduinos in asm/c now. I finally got him to like debian/pixel, but systemD...oh well.
He learned perl in about 3 days.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Donovan Ready » Tue Jun 20, 2017 8:00 pm

Ha! I'm 62, but I had some interesting educational opportunities in the late 70's. Never fooled with Hollerith cards, thank God, so I got in at just the right time..

Use of the Voice is fair, as far as I'm concerned. 8-)
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Re: Hello from a tiny town in Tennessee!

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Jun 20, 2017 8:04 pm

I raise you JCL!
One guy who worked in the same outfit as me kept with the cards for awhile before he went to Bell Labs Guy named Dennis, he was really good but we gave him no end of crap for making our boss get him a couple card machines to work on. We'd swap cards, take one out, the usual stuff.
Glad I worked for DEC, we mostly watched all that die while we replaced big rooms of machines with a few racks. The blue guys hated us.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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