Are you a professional programmer?

[wysota]

Define programming then

[Salazaar]

Define programming then

Well, developing software (mostly) using one of programming languages

[wysota]

Define "developing software" then... Is unit tester "developing software"? Is beta-tester "developing software"? Is helpdesk "developing software"? Is a gui designer "developing software"? What about software architects, designers, requirement engineers, etc?

[WinchellChung]

I became interested in computers in 1977 while in college. We programmed on Hollerith punch cards back then. I had a large project (making a 3-D star map) that I was doing with a pocket calculator. Took 15 minutes per star, and with 3,000 stars this was depressing. A friend wrote a quick and dirty Fortran program that did the calculations in no time flat. I was hooked.

Cut my teeth on an Atari 800 in the 1980's, went on to Pascal on the Macintosh/Lisa, then on to C++ on Windows.

I use Qt at work, and PyQt as a hobby.

[Salazaar]

Is unit tester "developing software"?

It depends. If he's just a pure tester, who don't know what is programming, than no. If he tests software to find out what and how to (of course, he thinks about code) improve a feature, than yes.

Is beta-tester "developing software"?

No, he's just testing (non-programming things)

Is helpdesk "developing software"?

What do you mean?

Is a gui designer "developing software"? What about software architects, designers, requirement engineers, etc?

Yes, they are

[marcel]

You'd be surprised to find out that they all are developing software, but of course, not by your definition, which is like 50 years old.

They are part of the software development process(which consists of all those phases, not necessarily in that order), therefore they are developing software, even if some of them do not write actual code.

If he tests software to find out what and how to (of course, he thinks about code) improve a feature, than yes.

A tester usually looks for bugs, not new functionalities or improvements.

[GreyGeek]

Yes.

I began "programming" by plugging a back panel with banana wires on an IBM 402 tabulator in the fall of 1959, fresh out of HS, while attending the Barns School of Business to learn "programming".

Nine years later I learned Fortran 64 in grad school.

Ten years later, in 1978, I purchased the first Apple ][+ sold on the state of Nebraska and used Apple BASIC to write custom software for folks who purchased Apples. I quickly switched to Pascal. In 1980 I switched to writing applications on the IBM PC using SAVVY, then switched ot AREV, then to Visual BASIC 3.0, then to PowerBuilder (3.0 to 5.0), then to Visual FoxPro for 10 years, then to Qt/C++ three years ago. Between languages used to put bacon on the breakfast table I experimented with other languages like Pilot, Turtle, Prolog, Forth (I wrote an auto parts store application using ACE Forth on an RS Xenix platform - Forth is my all time favorite language. Too bad its dead.), Java, Python, Ruby, Haskell, D and some others.

I retire in 5 months and will probably never program again. Going out using Qt/C++ is a great note on which to end a career!


It seems an odd fact that programming as a profession rose and is falling in concert with my career in that field. If pundits are correct programming will no longer consist of assembling lines of code and compiling them. It will be using web based application generators like APEX. Thank God I'm getting out in time.

[TimButterfield]

I am a professional programmer in at least a couple of the definitions proffered. I have been getting paid to develop software for 20+ years. I am also quite good at it, being proficient in many languages/technologies. Unfortunately, my Qt usage to date has been only personal (I also program as a hobby) and not as a part of my paid work. I gues if I release some of my work, the third category may also apply.

[john_god]

Nop.
I started programming in 1º year in university in 1994. I almost didn't know how to turn on a Pc when they gave C to drink. I spend long night hours doing stupid borland C ms-dos programs with the graphic library. Last university year spend the hole summer learning MFC from Visualc 6 with opengl to do a project that would show 3D graphics of electromagnetic waves. I now work as electrical engineer but I can't stop programming in free times. I also learn a little of php and mysql, but that doesn't satisfied me very much.

Can you tell me why you program ? I program because I feel fascinated with dialogs and graphic aplicattions and with developing algorithms. I would some times feel frustated because in Microsotf MFC everything seems complicated. I found Qt in Web few months ago and I feel like Microsoft has been cheating me for a long time. With Qt I feel I will be able to unleash some kind of secret mighty power.
That's my passion about programming.

[fullmetalcoder]

Can you tell me why you program ?

Solving (more or less) concrete problems, "building" things, optimizing complex algorithms as much as possible are the things that attract me most in programming.

Now on for the killer features that make programming much more attractive than physics :

• you're able to see the results of modifications a couple of seconds after making them
• experimentation is a lot easier and significantly cheaper

and also more attractive than mathematics :

• nobody bothers you with continuity, everything is discrete
• infinity sedom appears (I only faced it when considering the asymptotic behavior of algorithms in big-O notation)

And of course there are bigger and more lively communities, which makes a hell of a difference.

[rexi]

Can you tell me why you program ?

Well, I've been interested in computers for a long time now, since the old days of the C64, when I started my "programming career" with BASIC. There are a few reasons why I program, one is that I want to know how stuff works. That is why I sometimes bother to deal with such low level stuff as C I never got accustomed to assembler, though, that's simply a border I don't want to cross Even plain C++ can get quite annoying, and I doubt I would use it if it wasn't for Qt. I'm more like the Java kind of guy. Yes, I want to know how stuff works, but no, in everyday life I can't be bothered with dealing with all those quirks of a computer that these low level languages expose to you Fortunately, Qt brings C++ quite close to Java, and Qt's native stuff is an added benefit compared to Java.

I take the stand that a computer is a tool, and I like to be able to craft my tools into a shape that is most useful to me. So, the most important reason why I learned to program is to do so. If I have an itch to scratch that bothers me enough to spend the time to write an application/script/whatever, I do so. This, also, is the main reason why I use the software I'm using right now (Linux, KDE, Qt, to name the most important parts), as these enable me to solve my problems (more or less) easily, as they are open platforms that everybody can get involved with.

[Raccoon29]

I'm a pro too. Indeed I'm at office desk right now :P
My first program was a very simple test program in GWBASIC on an old Olivetti 286... around 20MB of memory... ahahah unbelievable nowdays! This was around 2002.
Then I started high school specializating in 2006, and I got already the passion for that language that is C++.
First GUI appl with Borland C++ Builder just 2 years ago... I don't remember what... maybe a CAD... but when I met Qt for work, then Borland became junk.
Most of all, Qt helped me a lot to even better understand C++ itself: inheritance, virtual, templates and so on... and not to forget the powerfull of signal/slot system

Why I program?? 'cause it makes me feel a god!
You know, create, edit, destroy... that's your own perfect world, you decide what there has to happen and how! If there pops out a problem, your task is to solve that problem, and often this is quite exciting too! C'mon isn't great when you simply push a button and then pops out an answer that would require at least an hour to compute manually??
It's absolutely great!

[john_god]

Why I program?? 'cause it makes me feel a god!
You know, create, edit, destroy... that's your own perfect world, you decide what there has to happen and how! If there pops out a problem, your task is to solve that problem, and often this is quite exciting too! C'mon isn't great when you simply push a button and then pops out an answer that would require at least an hour to compute manually??
It's absolutely great!

Yes, It's absolutely great !!!

[drescherjm]

I have been programming professionally since 1996. Well before that I started programming in the early 80s when the commodore vic 20 came out. For the most part I have had very few weeks between then and now that I have spent less than 40 hours programming. I would estimate I have broken 1 million lines of code. With the bulk of this being the 500K+ lines of MFC I churned out in the day job before I found Qt. To this point I have written 30 to 35K lines of Qt with the bulk of the Qt code being produced in the last 3 months while working on a cross-platform application for Lung CT viewing and analysis..

[vieraci]

I'm definitely not a professional programmer, I do it because I am a self-employed person and I program to suit my requirements. I've sold my creations in the past to others that saw and wanted what I had, but it's not my bread and butter.

[araglin]

I want to become professional programmer.
Began as network administrator, then graduated from university and became engineer in electronics. Worked in science for several years - I tested IC-chips in radiation environments. Developed small utilities using different languages along that time. That utilities were intended only for my purposes and not for public, so they were rather ugly.
And now I had enough of all this!
Left my job and now I'm trying to find a pure programmer job.

[RH-00]

No, I'm not a professional. I don't even refer to myself as professional, I prefer to use the word "competent." Professional just seems so...stuffy.

[squidge]

I'm a full time software engineer, but I wouldn't call myself professional. Experienced, yes.

[Tanuki-no Torigava]

I can refer myself as professional system (not really GUI) programmer. I started in 1988 on a crappy Mac clone from Bulgaria called Pravetz with Basic and latter with Asm. It was the only way to write stupid sprite-based graphics. Then I graduate a couple of universities. One of them was Tashkent State Technical University, Faculty of Applied Math. So I started there and got a chance to gamble with perforated paper.
In 1992 when I pulled some jobs for US NGO I started to use Linux first. Yeah, it was Slackware 2.0 or 3.0. And here came the C language from UNIX flavor. And a lot of UUCP based utilities. In those old times we did that on our laps. Not so much nice utilities. Then I moved away from programming and start to work as telco engineer, project manager, architect, executive, government official and in the very same moment I felt that I've been loosing myself. After considering a fact that the world has a lot of bad managers but just a few good engineers I quit my last positions to get back into programing and software development.

Last 5 years I spent on Linux distributions, GPS tracking systems and software PBX systems.

[ChrisW67]

Full time occupation: Check
People pay me for code I write: Check
Working with other people's code: Check
Competent: I like to think so, but still learning
Guru: No, not enough recent practice in any one thing
Wysota's level of Qt knowledge: No
Slightly wrong in the head: it helps!

Programming started with BASIC and Z-80 assembler circa 1983. Four year engineering degree in Digital Systems and Computer Engineering (Pascal, FORTRAN, other bits and pieces) . Three years coding/QA for real-time acoustics programming software in Coral 66. Ingres, Sybase, Oracle DBA for 7 years, and UNIX admin throughout. Coding for simulations in astronomy post-grad studies. A miscellany of small coding exercises to scratch many an itch. Now doing a port from VB3 and VB6 to Qt of some of the finest spaghetti code