Programming


I got into programming sometime in high school.  I started making simple programs on my TI-85 calculator.  They were mostly useless programs like a game taht would pick two random numbers, and if based on the relation between them you either won or lost.  I soon expanded this to make a simple "eight-ball" type program.  You would ask it a question and based on the two random number the program would either tell you yes or no (It would also give you a "maybe" if the two numbers were equal, but there is almost no chance in that happeneing).  So I went on to college and thought that it might be a fun idea to minor in Computer Science.  Afterall it's a very useful field.  However I really did not like the computer science department at Ohio State so I dropped the minor, but not before learning a little java and C++ (actually it wasn't really C++, it was RESOLVE/C++ which anyone who has used can attest to how bad it is).  During my little stint as a Computer Science minor I got a job with a physics professor writing visualization programs.  It is here where I have gotten most of my programming experience.  Here are the languages that I know:


Java

 Out of all the languages I know (which really isn't many) I know the most about java.  I really like java for visualization programs, I think it has one of the easiest GUI's, and a really good API.  In fact I use java in my job to make visualizations.  I am also learning about Java Server Pages (jsp's).  These are webpages which use java to dynamically generate the HTML code.  Part of my job is to develop an applet which will allow people to view molecules on the web, and part of this will use jsp's.

more information about java:

Some example programs

Perl

 Since java was really the only language that I knew for a while I used to use it for mosly everything.  However I eventually acquired a book about perl, and it has changed my view dramatically.  Perl is now my programming language of choice for basic, command-line-oriented programs.  Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language, and it is very good for things like text manipulation.  One of the major advantages about Perl is that it doesn't need a compiler.  It's run just like a script, a script.

more information on Perl:

Some Perl programs:

C programming

 I took an OSC workshop on the C language. I choose to learn C because it is a very fast language, well suited for computational physics which is something I am interested in. The nice thing about C is that many of the commands are unix commands too, so to find information about them you can use the man pages. I think that is also why C is fast. Anyway, here are some programs that I wrote while I was at the workshop:

Some C programs:

Unix Scripts

 I have just started geting into the world of unix scripts, so I can't really say much about them right now.  However they seem to be a little harder than the Perl or Java.  The problem is that there are many different shells and each shell has slightly different syntax.  For me thats a problem because at work I have to use C-shell, but at home I prefer bash or ksh.  Anyway, I don't have any examples of unix-scripts because all the ones I have made so far do not work!  But here are some websites that may help you out if you are interested in programming in unix.
 

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Edited by: ray@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu on

For questions or comments send mail to:  ray.163@osu.edu