LSL, the "gateway drug"

Has LSL been a "gateway drug" to more advanced languages for anyone else?

Published my first full-fledged C#/WPF application for work the other night. It works perfectly and everyone (myself, even more then the rest) is impressed. Simply amazing considering I hadn't done any programming before I joined SL in 2006. I've come a long way from my first "Hello World" or the first time I increased the particle count in a script. Being 50 years old (Guess old doggettes really can learn new tricks!) and jumping into what is considered a young persons field makes it even more rewarding.

Still remember the flurry of noob questions to this forum when I started and the pride I felt when I answered someone else's question the first time. I know that many here have come to LSL having experience with other languages. Just wondering thou if anyone else has done the reverse like I have and branched out because of LSL?

More of a relapse enabler! I fled IT several years ago to get away from that madness, but the surreal awfulness of LSL reeled me in.

(Completeing that thought: very cool that you were able to get something useful out if it, some people get stuck when they have to unlearn the peculiarities of offbeat first languages.)

I have had the mindset for about the last year that being a scripting virgin may have actually helped in some regards when it came to LSL. I had no preconceived notions of what was possible or HOW to do it. This meant that EVERYTHING was possible and I just had to figure out how to do it

Now I find myself on the edge of the same vast frontier again with C#. Even if someone had been using VS2005 C#, 2008 with Windows Presentation Foundation, LINQ & Net 3.5 are very different creatures with vastly improved capabilities. Working with images, DirectX and letting the video card do a lot of the work instead of pixel by pixel manipulation is new for everyone and I don't have to rethink how to do something. This affects everything including just creating a page from an application and printing it.

So once again, everything really is possible for me. I'll never end up with a job working for Microsoft or Google or even LL, but it is tremendously fun to be able to think of a way to do something easier at work and then see it come to life.

My first silly app btw was a nice, simple, neat, time card calculator for our receptionist. I walked by the other day and saw her struggling to do the time with 40 timecards, rounding to the nearest 1/4 hour, different clock in & out times for everyone etc. Now she has a very fast and simple app that allows her to enter the in out, in out times for the whole pay period, hit the calc button, it does the rounding and she sees the daily subtotal and the total for the week. Not exactly the Mount Rushmore of application developement projects but hey, what the heck, it's a start and a step up from "Hello World"

yes

its not really LSL, lsl in reality is not more or less difficult if you have the urge to learn a scripting language, and not know jack about scripting languages

but...

what makes it the gateway is the excellent community, the the ever present audience

the community provided documentation is excellent, starting with all the basics and going into the advanced and unexplored, and generally the people involved are more than willing to help out way beyond the call of duty

i write in a slew of languages now, i had not touched any form of scripting (aside from some php modding) since the apple ][ days before lsl, now i write in a large handful of languages and heres what i encounter everywhere else

"how do i do this?"... 3 days later "use this lib and go away"
"but what if?" ... "there is no other possible way"
"well i got this far but" ... "OMG why dont you just ask us to write it for you!"

some systems i have to scavenge 2 or 3 websites just to get the full freakin function list

some have everything listed but fail to list what you need for complex situations (meh heres a sentence on dynamic meta based multidimensional arrays) or go WAYYYYYY to in depth on simple crap (heres 9 pages on mathematical operators)

some will tell you how to make a full blast super nintendo game in 2 pages of script, but neglect to give you a "hello world" example (hack cough sdlbasic cough couch)

then theres C, which im learning now, and wow for such a powerful mid level language, there is the worst help in the universe for, ie i just read a 2 inch thick book on the subject, and not once did they explain int was a integer!

just type this crap in, and build on that, it doesnt matter you have no clue whats going on, just plop some text on the screen (if your a fan of richard prior or red fox you should see some of my first c files they have more cussing in the comments than a drunken aircraft carrier on porn night)

so yes, LSL could be assembly, written in hieroglyphs, and just because of the support base one could enter the wonderful world of scripting, and thats why LSL is a gateway

I had only dabbled with Qbasic since my ViC20/C64/Apple 2e days, now I'm getting my teeth into LSL and C++ at work as well, as just programing industrial computers PLC's has now led int HMI with C++ coding