How did you become a professional programmer?
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
Accidentally fell into CS at university (was studying EE at the time), fell in love with programming, and made that my career after graduating. There's nothing else in life I'd rather do than build software. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
After doing my tour in the military, I wasn't in the mood for hearing incompetent people telling me what to do, eg. not interested in returning to school. Being good at three things; * Dogs, not much of a market those days. * Blowing stuff up, not much of a market there either. * Programming, there was a large market and they were prepared to pay me :omg: So, still doing it 29 years later :cool: (and working with dogs on the side :laugh: and occasionally blowing stuff up :-D )
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
Actually, I'm a professional smartass. I have a coffee cup on my desk to prove it.
Software Zen:
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
Genetics. Pop was a programmer in the '60s. Just natural to go into the family business as my younger brother did as well. You are here - through no fault of mine!
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I miss pointers and all the other fun stuff in C++... Most of my time goes with C# now, and it SOOO boring :( Last week I had to make a small C++ project, and I remembered why programming was so much fun.
- Anders
You masochist you! :laugh:
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
In the middle of my studies for el. engineering degree I had compulsory course Basics of programming. It was mostly in C, with only later part in C++, and I liked it. A lot. After few years of playing with programming, I've decided to I should give it a try as professional. Then I've bought .Net 1.1 book, after six months I was on probation as junior programmer. Within three months I had to catch up with "big boys"... today I boast as professional developer. I've never ever regretted my decision to make career in something different than electrotechnics and I firmly believe it is the best job in the world. At least for me. :-D
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
Professional, in the sense of actually getting paid to write code. when I was a floor technician back in 93 or so compiling status reports by hand then entering that data into an Excel spreadsheet. I was able to automate the process with VBA, what used take over a day to complete now took 15 minutes. I received a spot award for that, wow! getting paid to type some stuff into a computer? I haven’t looked back since. The best part of it is that it is like getting paid to play. For me at least…
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
.jpg wrote:
I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program!
Sounds like my first experience when I was 10-11 (1981) with my first computer, a TI-994/A. They even had a TI magazine (forgot the name of it), where they had games written in hundreds or even thousands of lines of TI-Basic. I would spend whole weekends just typing it in, line-by-line, creating things like bad knock-off versions of space invaders. And, the worst part? The TI-994/A had no hard drive (only 32K of RAM - woo hoo!), so you had to save the programs to, I kid you not, a CASSETTE tape! (remember those?) To make things worse, trying to get all of that hard work back onto the computer from the cassette failed a majority of the time. :doh: But, I loved it, anyway, and to this day still miss my old TI. My big accomplishment ... my first program I wrote myself ... was a continuous loop that rapidly changed the color of the screen (i.e. a strobe light!). Those big monitors would light up a whole room. Turned off the lights and had strobes of different colors. Red worked the best (besides white, of course). All those hours in a strobe filled room ... that must explain a few things about me! :omg:
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
I started back in 73 (I was 14) on an ASR-33 connected to an HP-2000 via accoustic coupler. I learned pointers while taking an Assembly class at Control Data Institute. I had over-written my Base Pointer for my project. Once the instructor explained what I had done, I had a much better idea of what they were and how they were used. Needless to say, these days, many programmers don't understand them (and don't have to with the tools available today). The nuts and bolts of my assembly days are no longer necessary learning. I guess I'm old.
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
I was a professional studio photographer. I did all that dabbling in darkrooms stuff, retouching my transparencies on a light box with dyes and bleaches. Things started going digital and I saw my first copy of Adobe Photoshop. Things that took me hours on a light box could be done in seconds, and better still, if I screwed it up I could just hit 'UNDO'... I was hooked! I wanted to know what else these things were capable of, and found (to my amazement) that if I just read this book they could do whatever I wanted them to. The book in question was "C: A Dabhand Guide". I did a bit of shareware stuff to start with, and got invited by a mate of mine to write a bit of software to handle images for an image library in High Holbourn (REX Features). Got given a Mac and a copy of Metrowerks CodeWarrior - The rest is history...
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
It all starting with creating a blinking Christmas tree in BASIC back in junior high. Upon reaching college, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I started off at a two year college, the CIS degree was needing students so my adviser asked me to give that a try. :cool:
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I started back in 73 (I was 14) on an ASR-33 connected to an HP-2000 via accoustic coupler. I learned pointers while taking an Assembly class at Control Data Institute. I had over-written my Base Pointer for my project. Once the instructor explained what I had done, I had a much better idea of what they were and how they were used. Needless to say, these days, many programmers don't understand them (and don't have to with the tools available today). The nuts and bolts of my assembly days are no longer necessary learning. I guess I'm old.
Naaaa, it's always good to know the "nuts and bolts" of what's going on. My first computer course was in '77. I was a junior in high school and we wrote our programs in Fortran, created the punch cards in class, then took them to city hall to run them on the city's mainframe. I flunked my first college computer class, I wasn't intrested in using the punch cards and Fortran to do DB programs, I was more interested in the mini-mainframes in the main computer room that I could write GRAPHICS programs for (and save on... wait for it... punch TAPE!) I took a computer architecture class (when I finally went back to college) in '85 and an assembly course (used an 8088). I think those were the best courses for understanding what the computer is really doing each time you make a call or store something in memory. Makes me really appreciate the programming advancements... though you can't beat assembly for shear speed! I got into programming by accident. Started out drafting, earned a Materials Engineering degree, taught myself AutoCad (on DOS). I started writing lisp to do the grunt work for me, then parametric programs connecting to an Oracle DB I set up on an AS400 (the company financials server), then Quick Basic w/ Assembly. From there I took a job as a "real" programmer. :-D
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
I was a hungry engineering student, so I applied for a job as a research assistant doing programming. That was 40 years ago ...
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
I had an extra period in high school, and we had a model 026 keypunch. I decided to learn to program. There was this horrible "programmed learning" course from IBM. No grownups who knew anything, of course. I could punch a deck and *mail* it downtown to the public schools central office where it was run on the IBM 360, and mailed back to me eventually. It took 3 weeks for a round trip. Then I'd get an error message like, "expecting operator but , before J was found." and that would be all she wrote. I don't think I ever got a successful compile. The same room with the keybunch had a mechanical calculator. You could enter a long division problem at random and then wait for 15 seconds of "ka-chunk-a-chunk-a-chunk-a" while it ground out the solution, one decimal digit at a time. You had to place the decimal point in the result yourself. At the university, I took a 2-credit programming class featuring PDP-8 assembly language, emulated on a Cyber 6600 mainframe. The grad student leading the class had no concept of programming. When I asked "What should we name our variables?", he said "anything you want. Call them 'Kirk', 'Spock', and 'McCoy' if you like. So I did. The teacher didn't explain, and I didn't understand, the difference between symbolic constants (like for branch addresses) and variables, which, after all, were both alphanumeric constructs that held a numeric value. It took me a long time to figure this out sufficiently to get my assembler code (also on punched card decks) to work. On the strength of this vast programming experience, I answered an ad in the university newspaper for a programmer, and my career began. I was programming an Olivetti microprocessor called the A5, basically a posting machine (imagine a selectric typewriter on steroids) with a 4-bit microprocessor, about 2k bytes of memory, and a 256-byte magnetic stripe card reader. My GPA and the entry requirements of the Computer Science department crossed during exactly one academic quarter, which was the quarter I happened to choose to apply, and the rest is history. I was in the last class of undergraduates to program exclusively on punched cards. This was actually lucky, because the next class had to struggle mightily with a single VAX VMS system with so many users that the keyboard echo delay was up to 30 seconds. My work career was more recognizable, thank goodness.
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
Our high school didn't have computers. I had heard rumors about them but didn't really know what it was all about. I was good at math and physics in high school and didn't really know what I wanted to do so I started out in math and physics in college, thinking I might go into astronomy because I had been interested in it earlier. I stopped taking physics classes after I almost failed quantum mechanics because I just didn't get it and the astronomy classes they offered were boring. I decided to specialize in applied math. The Department of Electrical Engineering offered a FORTRAN class as an elective for applied math majors and I decided to try it out. A friend was taking COBOL and BASIC classes and it sounded interesting. It was one of those "aha" moments. As soon as I got into the class I knew this was what I wanted to do. It was too late to change my major but I took all the "computer science" classes they offered at the time. After college I got drafted and when I got out I went back to grad school for "computer engineering" but decided hardware design was not for me. I applied for a job with Control Data in the Detroit office since it was nearby. They sent my resume to Minneapolis and I got an offer to move here. I couldn't believe they would pay me $900 a month to do this. You don't get pointers unless you understand assembly language.
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
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.jpg wrote:
I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language.
I don't understand how anybody can "love" languages like C# (or VB or Java). Sure, it pays the bills, but it is boring and verbose. Of all languages I've worked with C# is the least joyful - I prefer even "ugly" languages like Perl and JavaScript.
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When I was about 13, 1992, one day I can't remember why but I bought a book like "teach yourself c++ in N days", the book ships with a floppy that includes a borland C++ ide, I follow the instruction line by line to install the ide, then copy line by line the sample source code, and had my first Hello World program compiled and run successfully. But honestly, I found myself can't actually understand what pointer is after reading the pointer chapters over and over for N times, so I gave up, in fact at that time, I don't even know what I was doing, what is compiling, what is linking, what is parsing, I have no idea, to me, I just write some code, then press a button, wow, I have a running program! Later I move to Visual Basic, I found that for people who first learn to program, having an immediate visual respond is really a big plus and encouragement to keep learning. I did keep learning Visual Basic for many years, from the very basic up to finding a need to call into Win32 api. After .NET was first introduced, I fall in love with C#, it is clean, easy to understand, and powerful, I love this language. When I feel that I can make a living by providing C# based solution, I started a company to do so. The business is still doing fine at this point.
I wrote my first program in Fortran IV and ran it on an IBM 360 back in 1969. This was part of the "numerical analysis" course(part of the EE curriculum). There was no O/S, just a compiler and loader that would eventually execute your program. Because this setup did not protect the rather rudimentary control program, my program crashed the system when I managed to write into the control program's memory. I was hooked at that point, but programming jobs were few and far between, basically requiring that you have ten years experience in technologies that were only a few years old. I never understood where they got their applicants. So after graduation I worked as an EE proficient in designing digital hardware (which is remarkable similar to programming in many ways). In 1984, the company I was working for was having money problems, so they told me that since the hardware design was complete, I could either leave or switch to programming. I've been a professional programmer ever since.
Fletcher Glenn
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Yeah, you either get pointers or you don't. There's no "in-between" there. Not a big deal though. At least on Windows platforms, a large majority of people write decent code without ever explicitly using pointers (or with minimal pointer usage).
Regards, Nish
Are you addicted to CP? If so, check this out: The Code Project Forum Analyzer : Find out how much of a life you don't have! My technology blog: voidnish.wordpress.com
"a large majority of people write decent code without ever explicitly using pointers (or with minimal pointer usage)" .. and those that understood pointers usually fixed their pointer-related bugs for them :) I never met a programmer who didn't get pointers yet could successfully use them, even minimally. Fortunately for everybody, there's now languages like C# out there that allow such folks to be productive without requiring a more competent programmer to follow them around cleaning up after them.
patbob