Programming with a Plan

Hello everyone,
In order to be able to program various things, it is importat to know how to set up a program and go into a project with a plan. There are three important parts of a program: the outputs that are required, the inputs that you will recieve, and finally the alorithm to order to get the desired outputs from the recieved inputs. To make things easier upon yourself, take out a seperate piece of paper and write what you want to do before you actually try to code it. After you finish coding the program and run it you can determine if it does what you want by checking out what the outputs were.
If you do not get the outputs that you want then the best thing that you can do is take a small break and get out a sheet of paper and follow the different sections to determine a variable's value at that given point. One of the good things that you can do is draw a picture or diagram, especially when you get to the more complex codes. When you use these steps, then you can make a good program without having a lot of stress

Job loss?

With the economy of the ways that the economy is going, I thought I would start a rant of how computer programmers are being affected by it. A couple weeks ago, I was getting bored while sitting in my dorm room, and decided to look at the news. What I saw was a story about how Microsoft will be laying off 5,000 of their workers over the next 18 months. The lead maker of microchips, Intel, had to lay off another 5,000 to 6,000 workers in order to accommodate for its 23 percent revenue loss according to the NY Times. Also, while sitting in class, our professor stated that IBM was one company that would no longer hiring people for their internship program. As a computer science major, and just in general trying to find a job is becoming to get very stressful since getting an internship is mandatory. It is getting hard to find a job willing to pay for you to work for them as an intern, which is pretty scary. Hopefully the economy gets better soon.

Intro language: C++ or Java

Hello all. Today I would like to talk about the 2 different languages that most schools use in their introduction to programming courses: C++ or Java. I was looking up earlier which one would be more beneficial to use and determined that it all depends what the students want to do in the future. In fact, the syntax of the two different languages are very similar to each other which may be because Java was derived from C++, but there are many differences. One of the most important differences is the speed, where C++ programming is significantly faster than Java programming . The advantage to Java programming though is its use in object oriented programming with their use of the GUI,or graphical user interface. A person, or school that is trying to learn and teach the art of making games online might want to use Java because of its graphics and also because some experts see C++ as being outdated. However, a person having to solve company based issues with tough or long algorithms may choose to write the program in C++, due to its simplicity and its speed. Schools may never agree which programming language to teach first, due to the advantages of each, but both are used in the business world effectively.

Under it all: All the bits and bytes

While thinking about making games and making big programs on the high level programming languages I was thinking about how it all started and what is underneath all of the complex code. In order to understand what goes on with the high level computer languages you need to understand what goes on underneath it all. Computers are full of 1's and 0's which are called binary numbers. These numbers all group together to make different letters, numbers, and characters. In order for you to convert a number into binary you have to follow a series of steps.

1. Divide the number you are trying to convert by 2
2. The remainder gets written down as a 0 or a 1.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2. The remainder will be written to the left of the number written before it until you can not divide the number any longer.

So why is all of this important? A computer bit can hold 1 binary number. A byte consists of a group of 8 bits grouped together and can hold any kind of character or number depending on what order the binary numbers are in. For example, the letter 'A' is 01000001 and 'a' is 01100001. It can get frustrating for computer programmers because if a 0 or a 1 is in the wrong spot, a program can do something completely different then what you want it to do.

Introduction

Hello all and welcome to Popping Programming! This blog will cover all the basics of programming you need to know such as proper syntax, form and different languages. It will start off talking about the basic languages that many programmers know such as Java and C++ and will then continue on to the languages not as well known such as Pascal, Dylan, and Ada. All programming languages consist of a compiler which converts the source code written by a programmer into machine language. After you write the code, you want to compile it and then you will know if the program has any errors or if it is error free. If it is error free, you are able to run your program to make sure that it does what you want it to do. If there is an error int your source code however, you have to correct it in order to make a working program!