Resisted for such a long time about Windows and MS.
Tried Code Warrior for Mac in the lat 1990's, poked around with Cocoa in the 2000's, peeked at NetBeans, Java, ActionScript for Flash, and Lazarus. Incrementally finding something that has both decent support and an environment that I feel I can be successful at coding.
I am not a programmer.
I am a microbiologist that has an interest in coding.
I'm ok with maths. My background is in food safety risk assessment, stochastic modelling.
My code examples are what works for me, not the best possible code.
Lazarus was like going back to early coding days. It reminded me of the adventure game my friend coded for his 286 in DOS.Thoroughly enjoyed relearning Pascal, writing relatively plain language code in and IDE that just seemed to WORK.
Until it stopped working.
For reasons completely unknown to me the project I was working on, just stopped working. Something about stack failure... compiled fine, but now my new forms wouldn't load without a crash.
It went from, one evening I was making some progress with new features, learning a little more, and feeling like I could actually do this without going prematurely mad.
Closed down the project and computer with a light heart.
Next evening... compiles and crashes. Quick net search found other people with the same problem. Tried half a dozen 'fixes', none of which did what I wanted, i.e. fix the problem. One of the 'helpful' solutions was to download the Lazarus source and compile it myself., using some, for me, obscure references to compiling options.
For goodness sake!
It put me back into the place from which I came -
"I've read a couple books on C, done all the code examples, made a dinky game in command line, now for a simple windowed GUI remake... WTF I can't even get this freaking button to work!"
However, now after questioning my very being and accepting that yes I am OK with MS products and using their IDE and the free license is also a good idea. I am rebuilding (for the 4th time*) my dinky game in MS Visual Studio 2013 in C#.
Advantages for me are coming to this with at least some idea of what I want to do, how to do it, familiarity with the basics of the language, having used a couple different IDE's before and a willingness to learn something new and calling it quits if it stops being fun.
Since my partner is not impressed with my (currently) three button game with a whole bunch of maths involved, I am telling you dear reader instead.
I should go to bed and prepare for another exciting day of microbiology tomorrow. All the while waiting impatiently for the time to come to add a few more lines of code and a new feature to the creature I'm trying to build.
*The other times were:
Cocoa
Flash
Lazarus
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