[gaza14]

right now i am at school finishing my standard grade computing and will be doing a higher in programming so who else studied programming in school?

P.S. what program did you use. right now we are made to use visual basic and html for web programming but does anyone get to use anything different.

[Cew27]

i do it in your computing class and infact got top score in out year for computing and i got top marks for programing (i also use java)

[spot]

I taught myself programming in FORTRAN when I was at school but they didn't have classes in it. It came in vaguely useful but not to the extent that I got improved grades. If I were starting again from scratch I'd choose a different language, probably php because it fits so easily into web pages.

The world of programmers is divided into two major classes, those who program in an Interactive Development Environment (IDE) and those who program with a text editor. Visual Basic's an IDE, for example. Your html code can have an IDE (like Dreamweaver maybe) or an editor but it's a rare programmer who writes Visual Basic by hand.

[Cew27]

whats the point in using a text editor, fair enough it makes you look at the code more when learning but its there to help you, its like programming in bytecode instead of the language

[spot]

What's the point in not using a text editor?

IDE's have some good points. They have code snippets you can insert with a click, that's neat. They let you drag-and-drop things, and when the program you're writing has a GUI front end then those drag-and-drop things can be widgets (like a command button or a database control) and dragging and dropping them makes so much sense that yes, of course I'd use an IDE to design a front end.

What I was thinking of was more the sort of php code inside a web page. The most I've seen an IDE usefully do for a web page is put in tags or create dozens of table TR TD pairs. I don't like snippets I haven't written myself.

What makes a text editor powerful is the copy/paste and the find and the search/replace functions.

Coding time is 10% of a project at the very very most. Not much of the overall project time can be reduced by having even the most effective of IDEs. Most of the time is in design, documentation and testing. When I'm actually coding I like to enjoy the experience, it's so rare.

The other thing is that 90% of coding is copying and adapting, not creating code from scratch. The time I've spent typing in new lines of code straight out of my head is very rare indeed. Adapting code you know works is a lot more efficient.

We might be talking about different coding of course. And I did agree that an IDE's good for building (and even designing) graphic aspects.

[gaza14]

ahh i hate my computing class. off 1 day and lost my grade 1! all i had to do was hand in an unfinished program and i would still get a 1! stupid sickness!!!!

[Gentry92]

lol gary got a grade 2 lol i got 1 im in his class lol and i stole all his work n00b lol and i got 1 mark less then cew27 (i forgot what LCD stood for) n00b!!!!!

[spot]

Don't mock, it was Lowest Common Denominator when I last did a class test.

[spot]

Oh... an afterthought on IDEs - they're really good run-time environments for single-stepping regions of code and applying breakpoints. It speeds testing up a lot in the initial stages to be able to examine your variables and watch your execution pathways.

[Gentry92]

liquid crystal display.....