ID:116641
 
Keywords: fuckyousatan, html5
Well, last week was pretty garbage. To be honest, it was one of the worst weeks of my life - so I suppose in perspective, my life is pretty great compared to some others.

Anyways, let's go down the list real quick.

  • Parents are getting a divorce.
  • Caught TB. Find out today if I'm active or not.
  • No programming accomplished aside from some web-design for a non-profit I'm working with.
  • Girlfriend's birthday. Girlfriend's best friend's mother got my girlfriend the same exact gift. -___-


Eh, not too bad. The first 2 are pretty horrible and I'm a bit pissed off about them, but I know I'll live. So I'll move onto the positives.

Most of you do not know this, and I wish I had pictures, but I love to swing dance. East coast, in particular. Last Friday we went downtown to a swing dancing club and stayed all night. I'm getting pretty good! My girlfriend joined as well as a bunch of our friends from our college group and we danced primarily all night. New hobby? I think so.

Anyways, if you were hoping to get some updates from me on... well, anything, I suppose I have a few.

I'm starting up a challenge of broadening my array of programming languages, to see which ones I like and feel I can prosper with. I'm not into the "the more languages you know, the better the programmer you are" bullshit. I'm much more garnered towards the "take the language that you feel most comfortable with that is geared towards what you are trying to do, and excel at it" approach. Some of you may disagree, but I have good reason for this. Similar to my idea about libraries, APIs, etc. (see a few posts below), if you are really good at one thing and not so good at another, then you have a few options. For example, let's take my web-design.

I'm good at back-end programming, but absolutely not artistic at all. I could go out and learn how to use Photoshop more than just the bare minimum, take classes, etc. but because I don't have an artistic background, it'd still take my far longer than the average designer to get up to speed with nice, professional graphics.

I work in a team, and this has always worked far better for me. Instead of getting stressed out about making half-assed graphics, I can focus solely on the programming, getting most sites done relatively quickly as my partner does the graphics. Think about the real world. You wouldn't want to be a blacksmith, a farmer, a computer technician, a carpenter, an architect, an engineer, a fireman, and a police officer all at the same time, would you? Probably not - I'd be pretty tired. You specialize in one or two of these things and become really, really good at them - that way, you can work altogether, and get more things accomplished. If everyone did everything simply in a mediocre fashion, then we'd be able to live, but I doubt we'd prosper.

Anyways, that's my rant on why I'm doing this - it's to learn which languages I want to use and why I want to use them. So, for this month, I'll be starting off with HTML5/JavaScript, hopefully ending the month off with a mini-game.

I'll post in the comments the resources I'm using the learn, and hope (especially from PopIsFizzy if he happens to read this) that you all will provide any links to resources you used as well in your journey's of learning this new(ish) style of web-dev / game-dev.
Sorry to hear about your problems. Keep your head up.

As for the programming adventure, good luck!
I would definitely encourage you to learn more languages, and it WILL make you a better programmer. You won't be better solely because you know more languages, but because you become more versatile with each new language you learn.

Generally, people who know a lot of programming languages are better because they've devoted more time to programming in general, rather than just the intricacies of a particular language, and allows them to choose the languages that are best for the job at hand, rather than forcing it to work in the one that they like best. As stephen001 put so well, learning more languages separates your logic from the syntax of the language and allows you to see the issue from a variety of viewpoints, not just the one you've tethered yourself to as your favorite. It also makes each new language you learn progressively easier as your logic becomes less and less attached to syntax, as you then have to learn just the syntax and you can get to work.
I'll definitely check those out. I know a bit of JS, but not enough to say I'm a master at it. I'm actually surprised you know Akihabara, I love his work - very inspired by it.

The thing I don't like about node.js is it's documentation is incredibly not-friendly at all. It's a pain to read - an immediate turn-off to me.
Game dev. in HTML5 is actually not that bad!