What do you use programming for?

[Abos]

...and I don't mean what is programming used for in general. I want to know what you personally use programming for.

I'm taking a C++ course at school, and I know that I know enough to make a pretty complex program, but I don't know where to start, or what to program. Any suggestions????


Thanks.

[Dun'kalis]

I am currently writing a wxPython text editor. Yes. Another text editor.

Why? Because I can.

Go and play with programs. You will find one that doesn't have a feature you want. Look through the code, see if you can cleanly add it. If not, write your own!

If you finish a project, you just did something that most people can't: finish something.

You don't have to release every project to the public. You don't need to make everything usable by people. I have some nice scripts I've written that are incredibly useful, but using them would be nearly impossible for other people.

Oh, and contribute to projects.

[inkedmn]

mostly i use it for fun; working on projects to help me learn different languages/concepts, etc. i also try to write things that will help me do my job better (and make my job easier :))

[truls]

Work :D

[threadhead]

i like programming in C....i use it for exploring unix.
one thing to say: great! :D

[Helper_Monkey]

I think the best explanation of (at least open source) programing is Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html). It could be my all time favorite programing paper. And to address your question, "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." It's an easy read, check it out.

[iDxMan]

I use it to keep food on the table. My examples may not help, but find something you need to have done and see if you can solve it.

A typical day consists of report creation/modification in various languages/reporting systems. I might use anything from a proprietary report language to another proprietary vb-like language to SQL to perl to php -- and so on.

Examples?

Data conversion:
* Due to some moron purchasing a bad system, I had to write a filter in perl to read our medicare claim file and rewrite it an acceptable [but wrong] format.
* Data to/from vendors: Numerous things have been done for data extraction/re-import. Due to their lack of technology they cannot provide a return file with adequate client identification, so I'll have to write something to read their file and match it against our data.
* User sync from unix [aix] to MySQL - this provides a unified login/password for system and intranet access. [again in perl]
* Some data is currently not organized in a way to easily [and quickly] report on, so I export then sync it to MySQL for display (via php) on our intranet.

Reporting:
* Sometimes its a pain to use the proprietary tools, so I'll just dump out the necessary data and wite something in perl to create a summary.

...and the list goes on.

[siqe]

In addition to my student job (fortran, yikes) I've got some just-for-fun projects like writing a program that will pipe data over a network from a computer that has a small hard disk to a computer that has a large hard disk, and I'm also writing a math library which is an ongoing thing. As far as learning goes, in the short term: RSA encryption, fast suffix sorting; in the long term: neural networks and solving PDE's numerically.

When I was taking modern physics lab a couple years ago would write programs to do the analysis. That saved me on at least one experiment.

C and C++ are the only programming languages I use when I'm having fun.