Portland.

I live in Vancouver, Washington. I think that it is a perfect place to live. It's not extremely busy like a huge city but it isn't real quiet like a small town out in the middle of no where. One of my favorite things about living in the Couve isn't Vancouver itself though. Its living twenty minutes away from Portland that is the fun part.

As a College student, I dont exactly have the biggest cash flow. Unfortunately (or fortunately, who knows) I have to be creative on what I go do for fun. The thing about living by P-Town and being able to hang out there is that you get to experience it but not be overwhelmed. One of my favorite things to do, it to just go down town and people watch.

The Darth Vader, kilt wearing, unicycle riding, bagpipe playing man can be spotted quite often around the city. I think it is great. You can meet some very interesting people in Portland. 

If you like interesting food, then Portland is the place to be! I love Thai food and Portland has a least 4 good Thai places you can eat. From Voodoo doughnuts to La Montage Bistro, you can't get tired of the food there. Not to mention all the random food carts! 

It's definitely a place you want to put on your bucket list! 

Why I chose C++ and Python

    Theres always people fighting over which programming language is the best. I think there probably is a "best" language out there but I think that if you're programming then you're doing something right. It all just depends on what companies are looking for and which languages they want you to know. It all seems overwhelming to me. From my point of view, it seems like Java, Python, C++, Ruby, and Javascript for UI seem to be the big languages right now. 

    I'm currently learning Python and C++. My university, Whitworth, kind of forced me to learn C++, whether I liked it or not. It seems like a really strict language to me. From what I've learned (I've only had one semester of C++) it's a very mathematical language and can handle math based algorithms really well. So it would seem to me that C++ is really good at physics engines. My older brother, who is pretty successful in the world of computer science, showed me this website: http://roberthodgin.com/eyeo-2012/. I don't know if you can click that or not. But you wont be disappointed when you look it up. The C++ source code on that website is all on git hub. It's a physics engine that Robert Thodgin, Andrew Bell, Hai Nguyen and Steven Schieberl wrote and played around with. It seemed like a really cool project to me. 

    I'm learning Python on my own. From what I understand, it is a dynamic language. I seems very freeing compared to C++. I like it because you don't have to use << endl; and you dont have to us the "<<" and ">>"! It just seems a lot easier to write more code with python than it would with C++. As I've mentioned, I'm learning python through Learning Python The Hard Way. It's kind of interesting that im learning python this way. In school, I'm getting exercises and I'm suppose to write all the code from scratch to do what the exercise is telling me to do. In LPTHW I'm copying all of the code and running it and then I change some of it to see what certain things do. Im curious to see which way is better for me to learn. The classroom/exercise way seems to be a lot more frustrating because you can make a stupid mistake and be stuck on it for quite a while. But of course you can make a copying error in LPTHW, which I have done a couple times. It gives you an error but you know that the code should run perfectly.

   So, in the end, I was kind of forced to learn C++. It's definitely not a bad thing. I think it's and awesome language and I'm going to keep it up. I chose to learn Python because i think it's a lot different than C++. I didn't want to learn a language on my own that turns out to be basically the same thing as C++. Just in general I didnt want to learn a C based language as my second language. I'm still not well versed in either language but I think over the next year I'll actually be able to start cool projects! I'll probably post them on Github. I like the idea of open source code, and I want to promote that.

Hackers and Painters

Paul Graham wrote Hackers and Painters for noody computer programmers looking to get into programming. A lot of what I'm reading write now is for beginners because I, myself, am a beginner. Graham is a credible hacker. He and a friend/business partner created, what he claims to be, the first solely web-based application. Viaweb, the site that he built, would allow the user to build a web-store right from the site. Viaweb ended up getting bought out by Yahoo! for quite a substantial amount of money. Graham talked about what it was like to start a start up business. He described it as putting a life time of effort into a 2-5 years and getting paid the figure for it. 

One of the points that he made that stood out to me was that computer science isn't really a science. Computer Science is actually an art. Like art you always are creating your own version of things straight from the start, even though it is probably not so good looking and a little sloppy. In a science you start out by copying things you know will work until you have enough understanding to do work on things no one understands. Computer science is quite the opposite. I really like looking at computer science as an art. Code can be beautiful and a lot of the times its the simplicity of code that does it. 

Over all, Graham gives good advice for beginners. He describes a lot of the popular programming languages and the pros and cons of them. In his opinion, Lisp is the best language out there. I think it would be fun to take a stab at it. I've decided to start learning python for right now, which Graham gives a lot of credit to. In class I'm learning C++, which, at this point, I don't know how useful it will be to me. But i can learn the concepts with professors help.