One thing we can’t forget is the constant search for a new version of LibFácil. When I used to program in Clipper, a friend nicknamed our library FazTudo, because we had almost everything ready in that library.

The time passed and I continue to look for a new version of LibFácil, whether in Java, C#, Python or Ruby. It’s interesting the effort a programmer makes to find new libraries. Many times, I’ve wasted more time searching for a new library than if I had implemented it from scratch myself. That’s part of the risk, but normally the reward of a library is greater stability and today in the Open Source world, we can count on daily updates, communities to solve bugs and endless downloads, tutorials and websites to learn how to do.

I woke up today thinking about what an IT professional should know. Thinking about what I’ve learned over the years, I came to the conclusion that the most important language is SamScript or Uncle Sam’s language.

Without English, what can you learn? Okay, there are exceptions, talented people who are almost magical and can learn cutting-edge technology without speaking English, but I don’t remember anyone’s name. Waiting for a Portuguese book won’t work; it’ll take at least two years.

Well, I didn’t post anything in November… December can’t be the same way.

Everyone makes plans for the new year, every year. We don’t always manage to do what we planned, but planning is already part of the good path.

In 2007, many good things happened here. We finally finished all the documentation for the move, my daughter was born, and I completed my master’s degree… all in one year. For 2008, it’s time to start a new business venture, continue studying statistics and mathematics, program a lot, and maybe finish writing a book about programming in Python, publish at least one scientific article… Of course, that’s all part of my plans. But I’m sure there will still be some things left to do by the end of 2008 :-)

I became a professor by accident. In college, I was good at math and always taught someone… it eventually got more serious. I started teaching private math classes while still in the first grade… by the time I was 18, I was an instructor for programming courses. I think my first course was Clipper :-)

In 1994, I became a teacher of logic and programming techniques as well as programming languages I and II. Teacher of algorithms, Cobol and C. Since then, I have become seriously interested in education and impressed by how quickly people learn. I confess that teaching programming is not easy, learning either. With some practice, it gets better, but I never felt content… I continue to look for new ways to teach programming. In recent years, I taught Python. A language I like a lot and use every day.

Everything was going well, but after the monograph I had a lot of free time to do other things. I decided to go back to Azeroth. After a mega download of over 500 MB, I was ready to play again.

First of all, I discovered that I had been expelled from my old guild, okay. They didn’t do raids; we called ourselves a guild for ganking :-) Not very useful, but it was fun to bother the Horde. Every weekend there were raids on enemy bases… useless, but fun.

When starting to write this post, I remember that July was a really busy month, without new posts on JungleCoders. But it was a month where I returned to reading about the issues of today about multiprocessing. A few years ago, there were fewer processors than users :-) It was the time of large computers or mainframes.

With the arrival of the personal processor, began the era of one-to-one, but they were small machines, with simple operating systems. Although there was a processor per user, there was no system operating system, much less resources on hardware to support task switching. Of course, for home computers, as super-micros and complete operating systems such as Unix already existed.

Today, for the second time this week, I read a text that caught my attention about the hypothesis of Sapir-Whorf, that is, the way language can influence behavior and the way people think. I made a parallel between programming languages and keyboards.

Reading about Ruby, I noticed the numerous symbols and frequency with which they are used in the language. For a poor guy like me, who uses a Belgian keyboard at work and a French keyboard at home… symbols matter a lot. The creator of the Ruby language, Yukihiro Matsumoto, probably used a Japanese keyboard. Okay, it’s similar to the QWERTY Western keyboard… but I’ll just register my thoughts on symbols and languages. I remember reading earlier that the @ was chosen as the symbol for email and how some symbols were chosen in FORTRAN due to the limited keyboards of the time (1956-1957) and later used by other languages. A page I found, which illustrates the hardness of those times, can be seen here.

It’s amazing how things are changing…

I remember when I managed to get my 2400 bps modem working with the Connect or Die BBS… late 80s, early 90s. I almost cried when I saw the small colored characters appearing on my screen. It was slow, but back then 1200 bps was normal. Even a text page took time to load, but it was worth it. The worst part was waking up in the middle of the night because the Mingo BBS only worked at that hour. We’re in Brazil, where monopolies were the norm, and phone lines were a luxury. My family had negotiated a phone line from 6 pm to midnight.

I’ve come to accept that I’m from a distant land. It’s interesting to know that many people are unaware of Brazil, not only internally but mainly outside.

You can even find travel guides to Brazil at the supermarket, but the trip is already another story. It’s intriguing because we manage to hide a country with nearly 200 million inhabitants, the fifth largest in the world.

I always observe where things I buy come from here. You can now buy lime from Brazil and seedless grapes, produced in Bahia.

In Python Your Life, I said I didn’t like Java. And I really didn’t. I first met Java at the Internet World 1996 in Rio de Janeiro :-). My last visit to that wonderful city. Single, with some money in my pocket… ah… Copacabana and the small bars of Rio… putz, I remembered that even back then I left my watch at home, afraid of robberies. But Rio is beautiful.

Well, Sun presented Java and mainly the differences between Java and JavaScript. I had a small provider in Manaus and we used a Sun server. I suffered to write the programs for the provider in C++, I remember spending two weeks looking for the binary files of GCC for microSparc… long live Google (back then the best was AltaVista). Java was free and the compiler from Sun cost around $3,000.00 (without manuals…), I fell in love with Applets and for a good time Java was just Applets.