A beginning programmer

[Thomas Jollans]

On 07/11/2011 12:22 AM, Thomas Jollans wrote:
> On 07/11/2011 12:06 AM, Eric wrote:
>> My problem is this though... I don't know what to do with this new
>> found knowledge of these languages. I'm a linux user so availability
>> of development tools is haaaaaaardly a problem. But I just don't know
>> what to do with it, I don't have any problems that need to be solved
>> and unfortunately I'm not familar enough with the languages (except
>> maybe c++) to help out the big projects like KDE / Gnome.
> 
> Open source bug trackers are a great source of problems. Take an open
> source program you like, ideally one with a sizeable and active user
> base, written in a programming language you're comfortable with, check
> out an open bug, and try solving it. This will
>  * Get you reading other people's code. You can learn a lot from this
>  * Provide a challenge
>  * Do good

Do note: Maybe you won't be able to create quality patches at first. But
you'll familiarize yourself with the language (and project) in time, and
if you follow a bug on a bug tracker, you can, when somebody else has
fixed it, study their patch as well. It's like a puzzle ;-)

As Andrew pointed out, KDE is written in C++. So you might want to check
that out.

> 
> CPython itself is a great project to have a go at. I don't know how
> familiar you are with C (as opposed to C++), but a large part of the
> code is written in Python, there's loads of activity on the bug tracker,
> and, in my experience, the community is very happy to help along new
> people contributing their first patch.
> 
> Cheers,
> Thomas