Back to Programming
When I was a kid, I was one of the first on my block to have a computer. Actually, I was one of the first in my whole city to have a computer. My mother worked for Texas Instruments, so early on I got a TI 99/4A. I learned my first programming language on that computer: BASIC. When I wrote a program, it had to be stored on a cassette tape. There was no external drive and certainly no internal one.
My second computer was a Commodore 64, one of the greatest computers ever made. It is claimed that more Commodore 64s were sold than any other single system, a record that still stands. It had an external floppy drive that was heavier than most laptops today and held only 64k of memory. Hard disks were still several years in the future.
Additional software could be bought for both of these computers. I mostly had games for the TI 99/4A, including a Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator (heaven to my young mind). But unfortunately (or, as it turns out, quite fortunately), we were still at a stage in our development as a civilization where parents had not become convinced that buying tons of software for their children was de rigeur. So, if I wanted a computer program, I had to write it myself.
That taught me a lot about computer programming. I spent hours reading books and learning how to write code. I would write database programs to keep track of addresses and problem solving programs to do my homework for me. Of course, writing the program to solve algebra problems and graph geometry equations meant that I needed to understand the problems very well. And ultimately I did more work than if I had just done the homework myself. But I also learned a lot more along the way. When I got to college, I took a class in BASIC, and I ended up learning only one thing that I didn’t know before taking the class.
Microsoft Windows 3.1 brought all this to an end. You couldn’t program on Windows. There was something Kabbalistic about the code that kept out most of us. And it got worse with Windows 95. I went from being a programmer to just another front end user.  For years, coding for Windows has been something I have wanted to do, but books on C++ just seemed more complex than I wanted to tackle.
This has changed now. Actually, it changed years ago with the development of Visual Basic, but somehow I didn’t hear about that. But I just discovered Visual C# Express, an IDE produced by Microsoft and available for download for free. It is rare I get giddy over new software these days, but this program has me very excited. Not only is programming accessible; it is also easy and even fun! I bought a book to learn C# and the Visual environment, and by the end of the first chapter I had written my own web browser.
Visual C# Express builds on Microsoft’s .NET framework, which makes things a lot easier. They have classes to do common tasks, and you simply have to drag and drop these into the form to make it work in the IDE.
I am very excited about the possibilities that this opens up. While I don’t see myself writing the next killer application, I do look forward to writing programs for fun. Who knows — perhaps I can even develop the next great Bible study program. Any ideas?
On March 26th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
2 1/2 years ago I got the idea that biblical studies needs an indexing program that can cater to scripture/ancient text indexes. I decided to pursue it a bit, and posted the potential job/opportunity on a coder site. I got the attention of a young coder who offered to do it for free (for the experience and reference for his resume). He started working on it, but then his job took off and it has been pretty much sitting on his shelf, so to speak. I wasn’t sure if it would ever get done, so i suggested the same thing to CINDEX, a cross-platform indexing program. The owner indicated interest, but hasn’t gotten back to me since (December).
The program is pretty close to being done as I understand it, and I did a lot of conceptual develoment for it and fed it to the coder. He designed it not only to handle scripture indexes, but subject and name as well. If you look at some of the indexing programs, their prices are outrageous. I wanted it to be an affordable alternative that also did something no other program can adequately do, scripture indexes.
The program is written in java, if I remember correctly, because I wanted it to be cross-platform.
If you are interested, you or anyone else, in taking over the coding part of the project (I would continue to stay connected in a limited capacity), let me know.
Danny