I take a relatively small number of courses each semester as a full time student and even then I don't consider anything but "at most every other day" to be regular programming. My experience as a student is not representative of my program, which is, AFAIK, pretty average or decent. The quality of programs rarely vary much anyway outside of a few schools with prestigious programs, e.g. Waterloo compsci.
Yes, I program. I have a B.S. in Computer Science and currently work as a Web Application Developer, using languages like PHP, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, etc.
I script.
OOP is beyond my meager failed engineering skills. Here's a few things I've wanted to do but can't:
Assign metadata to audio files by parsing a text file in the same folder.
Create a dynamic playlist based on a full text tag search in iOS or Android.
Organize a png's colormap using a custom order.
Split a big file into many smaller files based on the header info and rename the file based on information in the smaller file.
Every time I sit down and think I'm going to do one of these things I find myself giving up rapidly. If I can't do it in less than 100 lines, it's probably not going to get done.
"Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Chairman - do we have to call the Gentleman a gentleman if he's not one?"
I script.
Every time I sit down and think I'm going to do one of these things I find myself giving up rapidly. If I can't do it in less than 100 lines, it's probably not going to get done.
Write down the algorithm in plain English. You probably won't know the algorithm at first, so just start stabbing at what you think you need to do. When you reach a point where you realize it isn't working, go back and revise so that the next step is possible. Once you have the plain English algorithm, break it down into a list of steps. Turn each step into pseudocode. Turn the pseudocode into real code. Debug. If you can do it in less than 100 lines, it probably is simple enough that someone else has already done it.
tits
"Other". I have written a number of formulas in excel to do what would otherwise take a good amount of time, and I have done some light macro work for more extravagant tasks. But these are all work-related and I don't consider excel work to be coding. Though it's similar logic.
On that note, however, I am planning on writing something to take the brute force nature of one program's output and export it as a .csv or (wishful thinking here) an excel file. I've been teaching myself coding, so I don't expect to be done any time soon.
You can export it as a .csv and then import it into excel and then save it as an excel file.