I would describe myself as self-taught indeed. At the age of 6 I've been copying BASIC programs from the language manual which came with my ATARI 400. I learned pascal from Borland's Turbo Pascal integrated help. My very first job as a programmer was in C++, so before going to the interview, I bought a book, and spent a week or so in learning and practicing the language syntax. That was around the age of 17. 15 years passed since then, and I've been working (pretty much constantly) in over 10 different companies including 4 Startups. I finished my BA in economics when I was 20. It was a poor learning experience, but it did open some doors when I applied to jobs which required some higher degree...

I hate tabs, though I'm usually forced to use it in order to stay consistent with the rest of the source files I'm working on. I hate when I copy & paste my code somewhere and it looks all messed up because of the tabs not expanding correcly. What's worse is that when I want to change the indentation or change variable names, suddenly all the layout I've worked on gets distorted. When I hit the space bar, I want to see things moving to the right of it exactly by one space. I don't want it to cause the right part of the sentence to suddenly jump, and especially I don't want to keep pressing the silly space and watch how nothing happens.

Well done, good catch! "Codegen problem with nested do-while / for loops (/O2)" I just gave my vote of Very-Important. Note-to-self: try to avoid flying with Microsoft powered airplanes.

Yeah, MACROs can be evil - that reminds me an amusing link: The Secret to Better C - Worse Than Failure[^]