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On 17/07/10 23:11, Simon Waters wrote:
There are plenty of native BASIC interpreters for educational purposes for GNU/Linux, no need to touch WINE. Why you would teach a child BASIC is another question.
Well I'd say if it's something that you know yourself then it's easier to help someone learn.
The real games programmers are mostly C++ junkie - probably not the best place to start - most seem to suggest Java or C# and gentle introductions.
Guess it depends what you want to do, there's shedloads of VB.Net jobs out there in the Windows world, and when I worked as a programmer years back (my second job) I was writing programs in Basic on SCO Unix although it was simple stuff. Although saying that company I was working for had a couple of more advanced systems written in Quick Basic, Cobol and Delphi.
Looking at games developer jobs, they seem to want a university degree and C/C++ experience, although saying that I've read that some of these university courses don't teach the right things that games development studios are looking for.
That doesn't stop anyone doing their own games though, for instance putting together and selling a game on the Apple App Store or on the XBOX Live Indie Games.
XBOX Live Indie games are generally written in C# and use the XNA Framework, but an article on Wikipedia suggests that any '.NET compliant' language can be used. I believe to actually get your game on XBOX Live you have to pay a subscription fee to Microsoft ($49 for 4 months or $99 a year) but you do get 70% of any revenues made and some of the games on there are so simple (such as the one that makes the controllers vibrate!) and sell pretty well (especially since they're only a couple of quid a piece to purchase).
The only thing that's put me off looking into it further (such as learning C# and XNA) is the fact it appears there is a requirement for Windows (although the software to get started is free as in beer).
Of course the best way to learn programming concepts is to learn lots of different languages, but I'm not sure it helps.
Dunno, when I've tried to learn C, C++ and Pascal in the past I've always got frustrated, maybe it's because I was impatient. One of these days I'm going to get myself a good tutorial (can anyone recommend anything for C or C++?) and learn how to program in something other than Basic.
Oh and another one to try is Gambas, it's kind of like Visual Basic for Linux.
Anyone try App Inventor for Android yet?
Nope, not having an Android phone I didn't even know it existed (yes I'm aware I can download the Android dev kit and emulate an Android on my machine).
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq