Become a better programmer

Since I left college for a semester, I figured out I had to occupy myself with something, so I grabbed a huge-ass book about C and set myself a commitment: in 1 month I had to get the hang on implementing data structures in C. Yes, in C.

It really worked. Now I have a spankin’ new, fully functional linked list sitting in my hard drive, and I even took a couple of minutes to port the whole thing to Java. It even served me to notice the difference between C and Java: C involves a lot of tedious manual work, while Java takes care of that stuff automatically and lets you focus on your program.

I declare this thing complete!

Let’s see…

1. C language: done, I picked it up in programming 1, then saw more of it in operating platforms (the teacher made us work with some damn tough codes we had to figure out on our own D:), and then I took a DSP programming course which taught me stuff about C for microcontrollers.
2. Java: done, my data transmission teacher made me write a Huffmann compressor. I never finished it, but I was damn close, and I did it in Java. It was my crowning moment of awesome ^^
3. VHDL: done, saw it on digital electronics 101, got better at it in digital networking systems. It’s kinda weirdo at first, because programming in VHDL is designing hardware while writing software, but you finally get used to it (especially when you have to plug a programmable chip to the computer’s serial port… that was so fucking tough!).
4. Visual BASIC .net: done, saw it this semester. Didn’t liked it, but at least it stinks less than VB 6. I miss the control arrays though… they were really awesome, you could hide 60 buttons with just a little For loop. Database access is much, much easier in .net though.

The ones I’d really like to learn are C++, PHP and at least one scripting language, like Ruby or Python. Prolog would be cool too, and I have a book around gathering dust. This goal is still in progress.