Math, My Old Nemesis

By on July 15, 2011 in Code

Math is a funny thing.

I used to be exceed­ingly good at it once upon a time, and then I grav­i­tated toward more cre­ative pur­suits and some­how my brain decided that some reshuf­fling of intel­lec­tual pri­or­i­ties (and capa­bil­i­ties) was in order. Any­way, my trusty man­ual of Pro­gram­ming in Objective-C has me doing exer­cises that per­form math oper­a­tions, and I’ve been mak­ing var­i­ous per­mu­ta­tions of them just to make sure I under­stand the con­cepts. Con­tinue Reading →

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“Hello, World!” — The Flexible Greeting

By on July 14, 2011 in Code

Though I gen­er­ally laugh in the face of tra­di­tion and play to my youth­ful anti-establishment men­tal­ity, in the case of pro­gram­ming, wis­dom com­pels me to relax and take things from the begin­ning because — as I’ve already dis­cov­ered — this lan­guage can get con­fus­ing really fast.

Which brings me to “Hello World”, the quin­tes­sen­tial pro­gram­ming first step in any lan­guage. At this point, I’ve come across about 3 dif­fer­ent ways of writ­ing the “Hello World” pro­gram in Objective-C.

That’s a good sign, right? Con­tinue Reading →

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Tools of the Trade

By on July 12, 2011 in Blog

This jour­ney of a thou­sand steps begins humbly, with me assem­bling resources.

For interest’s sake, it may be worth men­tion­ing what I’ll be using to tackle this project, as the wealth of options made it some­thing I actu­ally spent quite a lot of time look­ing into. Let’s get into the results then — pre­pare for a storm of links! Con­tinue Reading →

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The Story So Far

By on July 11, 2011 in Blog

My name is Mar­ius Masalar and I’d like to tell a story all about how…I’m going to learn Objective-C and the Cocoa API. That’s the mission.

Your imme­di­ate reac­tion, under­stand­ably, might be to ask why on earth a com­poser would want to learn about pro­gram­ming? The answer is less unusual than you might expect; I come from a long line of engi­neers — whole family’s full of them — so I’ve inher­ited the think­ing process and thus have always been fas­ci­nated by the unique glam­our of the programmer’s life: relax­ing in a dark cave, churn­ing out poetic reams of pow­er­ful script in obscure lan­guages that mere mor­tals can merely gawk at.

I’m not cer­tain that glam­our is the word I’m look­ing for there, but you get the idea. There is a pre­dictable ele­gance to cod­ing that I admire in much the same way I admire beau­ti­ful usage of the Eng­lish lan­guage. Con­tinue Reading →

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