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From: "Michael F. Yoder" <yoder@decada.zko.dec.com>
Subject: Re: a little motivation, anyone?
Date: 1999/08/03
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Date: 1999-08-03T00:00:00+00:00
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Medley8086 wrote:
> 
> ...  What I'm asking is, could i please have some
> posts of what some of you other programmers made when you were starting out, in
> what languages, and how long it took.  I'm looking for stories to convince me
> while trying to work with stubborn code that I'm not algorithmically
> handicapped or just not cut out to be a coder at all.  Thanks in advance for
> anyone who decides to help.
> 
> E. Leron Culbreath

You seemed to indicate that you haven't used Pascal yet.  I suggest you
do this exercise (which I did when at CIT) after you've learned enough
Pascal to feel reasonably comfortable with the language.  (Modula-2 or
Ada should also work, but don't use C.)  It is an exercise from one of
Knuth's books.

Write a program which accepts as input a variably sized rectangle of
bits representing a crossword puzzle diagram (0 = white space, 1 = dark
space) and prints the diagram.  (ASCII art is fine.)  I suggest
garden-variety top-down programming with stepwise refinement; don't
bother trying to pay homage to any other buzzwords.

I wrote the program on paper in an evening and the next day typed and
debugged it.  I don't really remember the exact length of time for the
whole process.

If you do this, please tell me if you notice anything unusual about the
process after the point at which you have fixed the compiler errors.

-- 
Michael F. Yoder

Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right.
The scientist is distinguished by a desire to *be* right. -- W.V. Quine