My school still teaches us COBOL, for exactly that reason. (That, and the middle-aged teachers still think that COBOL is fun.)

I only consider online help if the software requires access to Internet to work. Otherwise, CHM. Or both. Sure, online help can be updated easily, but on the other hand, if the user is using an obsolete version of the software, it can be problematic.

If it's a Dell, it wouldn't hurt to check in the BIOS' SETUP program (F2 at POST) if the keyboard shortcut is enabled. It also lets you enable WiFi from there, I think.

A main function returning void is invalid in both C and C++, end of story, no matter that you care about what your program returns or not. (In C++, if you don't, just omit the return statement; in C, you can't omit it, just return 0.) A compiler that allows a main returning void breaks portability to other compilers (GCC, Intel). This is clearly stated in ISO's C++ specification (section 3.6.1; also answering the original poster's question):

An implementation shall not predefine the main function. This function shall not be overloaded. It shall have a return type of type int, but otherwise its type is implementation-defined.

See also: C++ FAQ Lite [29.3] Should I use void main() or int main()? and Stroustrup: Can I write "void main()"?.

Oh, and apparently, laptops with SSD drives tick them off. http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2008/03/steve_jobs_made_me_miss_my_fli.html[^]

Pros: - C++0x (although it has not yet been standardized; - Improved C++ Intellisense; - Ribbon designer (which I haven't really had the time to play with yet). Cons: - No Intellisense in C++/CLI (not that I use it much anyway); - Broken Intellisense in C; - No support for the (bitmap) coding font I use. The beta crashed on it, didn't try with the RC, but I do know that WPF (which I don't really like to begin with) doesn't support bitmap fonts. Conclusion: Not really excited. Might even wait for the release after this one.

And no one mentioned Hackers yet? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/[^]

They do there.

Wikipedia help us! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows#Timeline_of_releases[^] That said, it is worth remarking that Windows 7 is actually Windows 6.1. Oh, Microsoft...

I quite much like Envy Code R.[^] My second choice would be Consolas or Vera Sans Mono (tie). Third... hmm... I'd say Monaco.

I'd suggest SmallBasic as a first language.

I'm half-surprised no one has mentioned WOPR yet.

Like carlospc1970, I couldn't help but notice the strange similarity with COBOL. *shudder*... COBOL.

haemophilic

Matt Totten wrote:

And those of us who get a 10 year old piece of software dropped in our lap with almost no comments appreciate your efforts! I've had an awfully frustrating time the last couple of months tracing through reams of code for hours just to figure out what is happening.

I have to deal with that at work. For some reason my boss understands the code right away. Well, not me.

I do. Just... makes sense.

I saw it last week-end. I really rocked. The guy who said "An image is worth a thousand words" gets totally justified there. It was as good as Cars (I haven't seen Ratatouille yet, damn me), typical Pixar success. Just... it's unbelievable how many stuff - subtle or not - they can squeeze into a movie... references, jokes (inside or not - "A113" has been a long time inside joke among them, ask Wikipedia), messages... Visually it was also excellent. They pushed their limit again. Who would think about making trash so real-looking? All Pixar movies are among the rare movies that move me in some way. That's freaken cool. Worth seeing.

While I was learning, I made a Arkanoid/Breakout clone with VB.NET and GDI+. I think it's a good idea for practicing after learning basic concepts.

I'll tell you my experience as a self-taught teenager programmer (I'm 18 now). Maybe that'll be good input... Maybe. I started at his age with VB 4 (!! because I had it...), then quickly switched to VB.NET when I saw an ad about the free editions of Visual Studio (http://www.microsoft.com/express). Some time before I had my try with C++ and Java and didn't really pick it up. I did some mIRC scripting too (interesting to try, too). So yes, I picked VB up and liked it for its english-like syntax and visual designer. I started making a calculator program (good startup project if you ask me). So I drew its interface in Paint and recopied it in Visual Studio. Then I started double-clicking the UI elements (mainly buttons!) and wrote code... outputBox.Text &= "5" for example. I knew how to do basic coding elements (conditions, selects, functions, subs) from my little mIRC/BASIC/C++ experience, and I've read about (built-in) types in my C++ book. If I didn't know how to do something (for example converting from String to Integer (or Double)), I'd hit F1 and search. That worked well. One tip I can give you at this time... it doesn't matter if your son writes shitty code or even hacks when he's beginning. I wouldn't recommend starting directly with OOP. Since I saw some assembler, I thought it would be interesting to try to dis-ASM my own program. I knew what .NET meant, and I knew it ran its own bytecode, like Java. So I Googled for .NET disassembler and downloaded Reflector. That program was a kind of revelation. I didn't look at the disASMs for long, I was more interested by how it showed the elements of my program in a tree. Yes, that was how I was introduced to OOP. Interesting, huh? Yes, I've read some disassembly. Hovering my mouse over an instruction made a tooltip appear, explaining what it meant. Disassembling simple structures like my_var = 5 * other_var would be interesting. Reflector also acted as a really good .NET API reference and also showed me how that thing worked. Priceless. It also made me find out about C#, and I liked its syntax better. Reminded me of C++, JavaScript and mIRC. So I downloaded it, and made the switch. As simple as that. After that, well, some practicing. I eventually started writing more complex programs, learned more about OOP, threads and the like. I wrote a IRC client stub using smartirc4net. I never finished my calculator :-D . Then, I switched to C++. Why? Because it resembled C# and it was multiplatform, and everyone used it, etc. etc. For

Does anyone know of an existing website that does this? (I found one, but it hadn't been updated since 2006).

There's Project Euler, which is not really a competition, let's say more like a challenge — it's like, math problems that require programming to be solved. (Some people do it with pen and paper, but it's not something I'd do... mostly because I'm not that much of a math guru, heh).