Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Any of you other software dweebs playing with Scala?

I did exactly the same thing, with exactly the same languages, except that I'd never heard of C++, until I got the job that required me to learn C. My boss called me into his office, handed me Stroustrup, and said, "Have you ever heard of this language?" I said no, and he said, "Learn it."

So I did. It was eye-opening. My first C++ class was a TIFF codec. I remember that it was frickin' huge (because it included all the possible sub-codecs in the TIFF spec, which is a lot), but I don't really remember enough else about it to sufficiently nauseate me.

Occasionally I wish I could dig that code back up, buy a case of Dramamine, and examine it. I bet it's pretty horrifying.


So to change the subject, does anybody know where that expression--a coon's age--came from? Is it a racial slur, like Jerry-rig or Chinese fire drill or gyp?

Never mind--I just had to look it up.

Looked at Ruby very briefly before settling on Python, Python seemed more organized along the ways I think. Could've been wrong. For me tk seems like a pain in the ass, widgets never line up the way I expect so I have to fool with it more than I'd like. But it is small and built into the distros and well known. I may give wxPython a shot, it's been around a long time and is still being actively worked on. Yeah, if I switch an learn a new GUI I want to do it only once. What little I do on a PC is small stuff the usual commercial apps don't do or do in a cumbersome manner. Like this though it was as much for practice as a useful app.

Yeah, having lived here and there you have to be more circumspect in using the term in some parts of the country than others.

For that, I'd just make a command-line interface. It'd be simple enough to slap a GUI on it if I had to, but for something that simple--and for something I'd be the only one using--a GUI would be overkill.

Well, okay, unless it was in JavaScript. I could probably write that in JavaScript as part of a static .html file, test-driven with jasmine, and then load it into a browser for the GUI.

You could do it with a command line interface easily enough but with a window it's only 76 lines total and the bulk of that is from templates. And you don't have to try to remember the syntax next year. I've got another on the desktop that takes a scanned target image. You select a shot group and it calculates group size and a statistical analysis and presents them graphically as you choose over the target image which you can save or print. Unfortunately I updated Python a few weeks ago and haven't installed the PIL image library so I can't add a screen shot right now. Boring anyway.

I'm a Unix guy, though. I figure with functionality like that, I'd want to use it as a utility in a bigger program. That's much easier with a command-line interface than with a GUI.