Page 1 of 1
A Pascal Competition
Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 10:24 am
by Gunner
There'sa kind of IT competition in my country, so I just entered out one for a selection. I got like 35 questions for 2 hours. The main topic of it was about math something and stuff which was pretty giving me some headache since I am a pretty newb for all of these stuff. I believe it was Pascal, a really old programming language but still newbie-friendly with its begin and end command . Often I am asked, what can I do with math-programming? (idk what's the name lol) like errmmm .. logical expressions, algorythm and stuff. Like, am I really gonna use all of these in my carreer? Please help me with this, I'm so confused about what should I do after finishing out my school.
Thanks!
Re: A Pascal Competition
Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 1:46 pm
by hallsofvallhalla
Math is the one subject in school you WILL use. I have never used history to get ahead in my career. Nor science nor social studies. Never as a IT person or as a programmer has knowing about the french revolution have I solved a problem. Math on the other hand is a constant. In every field you will use it. Everything from cutting grass to designing a rocket. You will use math.
There is no such thing as knowing too much math. I actually bought some math books the other day and going back through them to re learn things I missed in high school.
Re: A Pascal Competition
Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 4:24 pm
by Sharlenwar
But history is just as important Halls, when designing a game you want to create the necessary background to a current situation. Thus, history is a great way to come up with some great plot twists and stories of all various kinds. There are some amazing accounts by people from WW2 that give one an in depth personal view to history. Which can be turned into some amazing storylines for whatever game you are looking at creating.
Game Design will use all aspects of your life. So work hard at all that you do to succeed and jump ahead.
Re: A Pascal Competition
Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 6:23 pm
by hallsofvallhalla
No doubt but I can read a WW2 history book in a few hours and get enough to make a game. I cannot however learn enough math for an entire game in a few hours.
I am not saying the other subjects are not important, just saying compared to math they are side notes.
Re: A Pascal Competition
Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2013 10:04 pm
by Jackolantern
I love math! As others have said, you will use it constantly. Just the other day at the drug store my wife was looking at a bottle of vitamins. It showed a picture supposedly true to size of the pill, but it didn't say how many were in it, oddly enough. Using just the picture of the pill and the dimensions of the bottle, I estimated within 10 pills that the bottle contained 120 (I think I came out with 127, which obviously wasn't it, as that is a strange number, so I assumed it was 120). If you want to do any kind of traditional game programming, where you have animated or 3D characters moving around in and interacting with a virtual world, you need a strong background of math to make that happen.
As for history, I love history and have found it very useful in my professional career. However, not in a way that it directly links to my work. Instead, it allows me to keep up in conversations and interest and entertain my superiors. I swear my knowledge of history was one of the things that got me into the executive inner-circle at a telecom company where I got my largest promotion ever (from bottom-wrung grunt to upper-level management)! Oftentimes the social aspects at a job are just as important as the work you do, sadly. Being able to easily discuss ancient Middle-Eastern history, boat aerodynamics, computers, astronomy, chemistry and others made me best friends with the vice-president of the company lol.
EDIT: And as a side-note, Pascal is still alive and well today! Its main application simply goes by the name
Delphi. It is actually a pretty impressive package that rivals Visual Studio in the IDE department. If it wasn't so expensive, so hard to find jobs in, and had some decent learning tutorials, I would pick it up just for how awesome it looks!
Re: A Pascal Competition
Posted: Sun Aug 25, 2013 3:10 am
by hallsofvallhalla
Good point Jack.