(no subject)

First off, cool news: Google adds ability to search historical newspaper archives. I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but personally this makes me sleep a bit easier knowing it's now become that much harder for the people in power to change history without anyone noticing.

On a more personal note, I've reached the point where if I don't code something soon, I'm going to go utterly stark-raving bonkers. It's becoming an itch in the back of my mind.

That said, most of the day I'm at work with little opportunity to code. Or commuting, with less. Or at school. And even at home, I don't really have a development environment set up (yet). Too many tools to choose from, and I'm not really sure which ones I need to just get started. Almost makes me wish Debian had a "programming" tasksel grouping that added the most popular or most basic development tools to your system.

I'm thinking about opening up a post here to do some basic coding in as I have free time. Nothing too complex, obviously... at least not at first. Just enough to scratch my itch a little. And maybe I'll build on it over time, make it more complex, rather than opening new posts. We'll see.

I'm an idiot.

I'm a complete idiot. I've been so busy obsessing about which tools are the "best" for programming on linux, which interface builders and IDEs and everything, that I never really thought about the actual minimum I needed to begin programming on linux. Turned out, it was a lot less than I would have thought:

A text editor, and a compiler. Period.

Granted, some of the other tools may make it easier, but they're not necessary and they might actually get in the way of learning some aspects of it if I'm relying on them to simplify things for me.

I was also doing much the same thing with trying to understand all the libraries and APIs available for programming in C++. There were so many of them, I was starting to get overwhelmed. I felt like I needed a catalog of them all just to get started. Errm, no. No more than you need a catalog of an entire library to start a research project on Plato. You only need the relevant volumes. I only need the basic libraries for the relevant functions. I get that now.

Time to really start.