Howdy All

[Miles Williams]

Well...

Seems this place has changed quite a bit over the years.

I first came year about 5 years ago I think. I was just starting to learn programming at that time and Java seemed like a good language, I had a little bit of previous experience with VB but very limited and when it comes to GUI's VB holds your hand for the most part. It wasn't long though before I started to dabble in other languages and over the years I've given all the mainstream ones at least a try...

C, C++, C#, Delphi, Go, Haskell, JavaScript, Kotlin, Lisp, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scratch (teaching my kids, lots of fun ), VB.NET, and VBA. There are likely some more I fiddled around with that I can't remember at the moment. Some I delved into deeply, like Python (great for speed of implementation and patching together small task automations), Lua (building Roblox games for my kids), JavaScript (something I avoided for years but am now very keen on), the C's (for pretty much anything you want to build that needs speed, or in the case of C# for Windows GUI's), and kind of depressingly, the one I've been using the most of late, VBA (to create Office Applications and automate CorelDRAW at work). I don't work in software, but I still get to code pretty much every day as I always have ideas for automating my tasks at work.

Anyway. After much "travelling", I am back... I didn't dive too deeply into Java, but now I feel it is time to give it a good go and I remembered this place and thought I would pop in. After having a little look about I am quite impressed with the way it has come along and I am very keen to get into learning all about Java and hopefully this time I stick with it and not get distracted (halfway through learning C++ I decided my math wasn't up to par so spent a year doing calculus and linear algebra, then never went back to C++).

So yeah., Howdy folks. Hope to see ya'll 'round!

[Tim Cooke]

Welcome back Miles! We're a friendly bunch here so make yourself comfy and ask for all the help you want.

As you've noticed, the forum software is in continual development by our wonderfully talented volunteer staff who like to make our little corner of the internet better and better just for the love of it.

See you around.
Tim

[Campbell Ritchie]

Welcome back

[Miles Williams]

Thanks folks.

I'm sure I'll have a LOT of questions over the coming years, I'm an extremely inquisitive person by nature and really like to dig down deep and get a thorough understanding of how things work. This can be detrimental to my progress at times though because the deeper I go the more concepts I come across that I feel inadequately educated in which causes me to dig down into those until I feel I've got a thorough understanding. It's like an exponential runtime as I recurse into the learn(topic) function, and sometimes I blow the stack and all my memory spills out and values that hadn't yet been returned from the learn function back down the stack are gone and I gotta start over again. Sorry, my analogy writing isn't the best.

Hope to see you round and get a chance to pick your brains.

Cheers.

[Liutauras Vilda]

Welcome back, Miles.

C, C++, C#, Delphi, Go, Haskell, JavaScript, Kotlin, Lisp, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scratch (teaching my kids...

Don't forget to say a word or two about Ranch to your kids, they seem to be polyglots by now, so we are expecting to onboard their knowledge

[Tim Cooke]

I call that 'falling down the rabbit hole'. We all do it, the skill is recognising and stopping yourself from falling too deep.