127 karma · joined May 1, 2013
Re. Qt on Macs: sure, matter of fact I prefer to work with Qt on my MBP, the fonts are prettier etc.
I first tested Qt one year ago, they are really making progress, you should check out the recent release 5.2.
BTW, I've started a blog (mostly) about Qt: http://tripleboot.org
If you have a Windows XP installed somewhere, you can learn some assembler just by playing/poking the video memory with the old DEBUG.EXE program, like this:
1) Switch to fullscreen/DOS mode by running CMD.EXE and pressing ALT+RETURN. 2) Start DEBUG.EXE 3) Check you're on the right track by entering df000:0, it should display ... IBM COMPATIBLE... something 4) Fill the video memory, e.g. fb800:0 888 1 2 3 4 5 6
Try to understand what you just did :-) then try to enter some assembly code, start with the command a100
Re. our progress with computers, I think actually things have progressed rather nicely, ok maybe not so much with JS but look at Go for example, they're really trying to fulfill the old dream from the 80's of "sofware ICs". I've just written some small test programs in Go, but it's remarkable that once I've built an .EXE file, I can copy and run it on other Windows computers, no installation or other configuration necessary.
BTW, I'm testing out Qt right now, in that framework there are some great promises of code reuse.
It's C++ though :-)
Re. assembly, I'm pushing 60 so I've written a lot of assembler in the days, most of it on PDP11 and AppleII. Last time I coded in assembly was 1993, so if you're not writing your own BIOS you're good without it.
Funny, though. The other day I missed something from assembler, and I'm not taking about speed or lowlevel stuff. No it was the ability to switch text segments, in C++ it would be equivalent to be able, in a single .cpp file, to switch from one translation unit to another.
In most other languages (recently I've done a bit of Python) you feel like your walking in someone else's shoes. But with C/C++ it's just you and the machine.