If extremist Muslims aren't Muslims, what are they? They're not extremist Christians, or extremist Buddhists. There are no generic "extremist religious people" that I've ever heard of.

Everyone and everything acts like you learn a programming language and you program your computer and that's it, when in fact learning a programming language means absolutely nothing.

GabuEx, I don't want to use a reference book. I want to know what I know and have that be it. I don't want a seven-hundred page reference book by me unless it's for complex mathematical algorithms or something of that sort. If it has ANYTHING AT ALL to do with fundamental ideas and even the NASTY LITTLE DETAILS of the FUNDAMENTALS I want to know it, not have a book to tell me when I hit a dead end all the time or to tell me how I should be doing something every five minutes because the easier way makes security holes in the program or just isn't smart. So it takes a long time and it's all work and no fun. I read Thinking in C++ recently. Do I know every detail of it? Not really, I'll have to go back through it and read about when statics go conky and when to insert this instead of that. It's an 800 page book. That book, I guess it's just my memory and not the book. It's layed out well. Do I have a horrible memory? No. So it's just grinding and grinding and grinding. Then what can do when I memorize it? Nothing. I need to learn about a completely separate library and all of its details to really do something. Knowledge of C++ does not inherently create fun things to do. It gives you a way to do them. The fun things come with their own separate necessary knowledge, and it's random and chaotic and spread out over fifty-thousand branches and fields if it's very complex. If it isn't, I can't think of what it is. I started out thinking I could do a million things if I could program. Now, I can't even think of something I could add to an existing program that wouldn't take a lot of effort.

And that I would have a lot of fun programming, if there were anything to do with it.

[QUOTE="c_moriarty"]

I wouldn't say it's self-pity, I would say I'm pointing out a lot of realistic things about reality which no one anywhere on the internet seems capable of doing. If you went to college for even eight years and now program geosynchronous spacecraft kernels, you're in the Twilight Zone or you have an I.Q. of 180. If you have been grinding on programming practically your whole life and are now capable of such things, it wasn't college, so no one has a reason to act like getting a degree has anything to do with what they do for a living, and if it does they couldn't do it in four years without being on a meth binge the entire time. Or it's ordinary and not extraordinary.

GabuEx

No, it absolutely is self-pity. You aren't just talking about programming and computer science. You said in no uncertain terms that you can't do anything. So, you know what, I'll believe you. Why not? I have no reason to doubt it. If you don't want me to believe you when you say you can't do anything, then you're more than welcome to prove me wrong. I'm not going to go out of my way to praise you or console you when you talk like that. I should know; I talked like that before and I know damn well I was just enjoying the attention that came with the sympathy people gave me. If you're serious about wanting to do something, then pull yourself up and do it. Simple as that. I'm not going to drag you to water and make you drink.

And I have zero, zero, zero art talent. I hate math. I have to work my life away to learn how to do anything else. I'm going to get serious and pull myself up to what? Not art, not writing, not programming, not hardware. Coincidentally not one of these natural talents has illuminated my life. I have to grind and grind and work my life away to do anything. I was told in school, and by my whatever-its-called congeniality or comphrehension or whatever tests that I had some reasonable intelligence. If so, then it's extremely hard work to do anything and everyone acts like it's easy. If when I was younger everyone told me that every kind of knowledge in the world was a pain in the ass to come by, I would've relaxed more when the computer and television bonked me on the head with the giggle-happy mathematicians and fifteen-year-old government computer hackers wrench.

It's my personal opinion that incredibly intelligent people get giggles from doing advanced mathematics and engineering of whatever sort, and everyone else goes through miserable amounts of effort to make money.

And that almost no one anywhere can do anything but write jigsaw-puzzle books about anything.

[QUOTE="c_moriarty"]

I wouldn't say it's self-pity, I would say I'm pointing out a lot of realistic things about reality which no one anywhere on the internet seems capable of doing. If you went to college for even eight years and now program geosynchronous spacecraft kernels, you're in the Twilight Zone or you have an I.Q. of 180. If you have been grinding on programming practically your whole life and are now capable of such things, it wasn't college, so no one has a reason to act like getting a degree has anything to do with what they do for a living, and if it does they couldn't do it in four years without being on a meth binge the entire time. Or it's ordinary and not extraordinary.

GabuEx

No, it absolutely is self-pity. You aren't just talking about programming and computer science. You said in no uncertain terms that you can't do anything. So, you know what, I'll believe you. Why not? I have no reason to doubt it. If you don't want me to believe you when you say you can't do anything, then you're more than welcome to prove me wrong. I'm not going to go out of my way to praise you or console you when you talk like that. I should know; I talked like that before and I know damn well I was just enjoying the attention that came with the sympathy people gave me. If you're serious about wanting to do something, then pull yourself up and do it. Simple as that. I'm not going to drag you to water and make you drink.

Well, I find it to be an amazing coincidence that everything has been hard work for me that has lead to nothing and that everyone else has things fall into their lap. It seems more likely to me that having everything fall into your lap would be very, very rare compared to having to work your ass off and have an aneurism at the age of forty to accomplish a great many things. And does anyone say so? No. So apparently they just don't give a damn about everyone else grinding themselves to death to do what they want to do and they just act like they coasted through everything and giggle about all the fun times. If there had been a lot of people telling me and made it very clear that computer science and programming was a pain in the ass and that you couldn't achieve anything personally without back-breaking effort years ago, I wouldn't have spent nearly as much time trying to learn it. I figured since everyone has nothing but stories of going to college for four years and doing whatever the hell they want with any computer they want whenever they want in whatever language they want that it must be one of the easiest things in the world to do and that it must be as fun five years after you start as it is the first day. But it's absolutely objectively a backbreaking chore to get anything done in computers, mathematics, programming, whatever.

And a carrot is dangled in front of my face, that if I read a minimum of five of these books I could maybe add a file or two to an open-source project unless I get a degree that involves level four calculus and algorithmic hinky-finky-binky.

Advanced computer science and programming are not for hobbyists unless they like teamwork or they grind their ass off because there is nothing in the world that is more enjoyable.

i do kind of agree with TC's point underneath the rant. alot of programming books are simply sucky. they ease you along get to that next level generally classes and pointers which are notoriously difficult for new people to the field and gloss over them with overcomplicated explanations and that includes a boat load of new vocab. then move to the next chapter and expect you to of somehow mastered these two concepts when they did a piss poor job of explaining them to begin with. college is no better. kayoticdreamz

No one can write a respectable, read-once-and-move-on book. Everyone writes fifty-dollar jigsaw puzzle books with a sentence of explanation for words and topics then a five-chapter break and then that one-sentence topic used in a more complex way in the middle of an example about God-knows-what-kind-of mathematical generators with (for good measure) a few things thrown in that aren't, themselves, introduced until five chapters later.

And math, in my personal opinion is terrible and makes me want to gouge my eyes out with my thumbs. And obviously I should spend less time paying attention to all the implied read-between-the-lines things on the internet where forty-year-old men are holding NASA up on their shoulders with their programming expertise. Maybe Hollywood bored its way into my mind when I watched Hackers when I was young and figured that by the time I was twenty I'd be hacking holographic mainframes and it didn't go away until I realized that there's nothing for me as a person to do with computers or programming knowledge. Unless I spend all my time on it until I'm middle-aged and then maybe I can hack into a poorly-guarded command-line instead of a governmental holographic mainframe of some sort.

And if you're looking to accomplish great things worthy of an opera by yourself and/or for yourself, do not get into computer science and programming unless you have an I.Q. of 180 or plan on doing nothing else for the rest of your life.

c_moriarty

Everything I've read on the internet and seen on television and read in books or whatever has lead me to believe otherwise, but they're full of crap and I have no idea what they're talking about. It's just grind, grind, grind, and money, money, money, and I.Q.'s of 180 so they can read a dozen books while they're on the crapper a month.