What could possibly make coding fun?

motives

sittin here, second lesson in MEL and im just hating it with every bone in my body..

How do you go about to consider coding to be atleast tolerable?

Snowfly

having a goal in mind, i guess. you learning it on your own? probably not.. your instructor hasn't given a good enough preface?

Major Clod

If i'm doing something fun like flash, I don't mind it. I like to be able to see the results of my coding on screen. If i'm doing some data structures in C++ or something boring and ungodly, I can't stand it!

Malekyth

I learned to love MaxScript and MEL just by sticking with it and learning enough to make cool stuff happen. My first hardcore application of scripting was in MaxScript, changing every single one of the Unreal Championship 2 weapon animations. We added some functionality that required revising each skeleton, which broke the animations and would've required a whole lot of tedious manual fixing and even some re-doing if it weren't for MaxScript swooping in and saving the day and my ass!

Just keep hacking at it and you'll find a use for it sooner or later, and then I think you'll start to love it. It's really interesting stuff once you get past the initial obscurity.

motives

the way our teacher went about it was just get in the classroom and then he started writing variables without any further explanation.. very confusing to say the least :S

i guess this togheter with my "enthusiasm" for coding isnt a very good combination

KDR_11k

If you think code theory is bad you haven't seen what we do in university. We started with abstraction theory, now moving to signal theory, math fundamentals and functional programming (Haskell).
On the other hand, coding, especially when it involves 3d graphics, is quite math-heavy. I certainly didn't have 4-dimensional math in school which is too bad since you need that for skeletal animation.

shotgun

The chicks.

doc rob

It's somewhat like learning a new 3d package; once you're over the hump and able to do something creative with the language, you can do all kinds of interesting things.

Irritant

Like Doc Rob said, once you've learned enough to be able to be fluent, you'll soon see coding as being very similar to art.

Dravalen

Like Rob/Irritant said, once you'got a solid grasp of any language it becomes much less burdensome. That is of course until you start debugging.

CheapAlert

I find doing all the coding, whether it's QuakeC, .cs or .cpp, all in MS-DOS Edit. I feel it's much more comfortable there

KDR_11k

Cheap's mind is too simple to wrap around Vim. Do not use Emacs for it is the way of the dark side.
But seriously, MSDOS edit sucks, get a better editor. Context, EditPro, Vim, whatever strikes your fancy (as long as it's not Emacs).

Rwolf

I did 1 Visual Basic Course back in High School, and that was the last of that...

Good luck however :P

KDR_11k

Visual Basic isn't programming, it's a practical insult.

RickA

The same reason you think art is fun

It's always extremely gratifying to see the pieces of your code come together to form something more complicated. Then again, I do most of my programmig on graphics, which is even more instant reward (once it works).

motives

yea i suppose you guys are right. I will atleast do my best and stick with it until the end of the course

I already made a slider that controls the rotate X value of a piece of geo.. I ROOOL!

scanning_factor

welllll, the fact that i get paid to write mel scripts and shaders helps make it a bit more fun for sure:) the thing that makes it fun for me tho is mainly that im not that good of an artist, so being able to write a shader is much more intuitive to me than say painting a texture for example. also once i really learned mel well and realized what kind of tools i could write with it, it was(is still) fun seeing what kind of wacky maya tools i can come up with, and it makes me 3d more fun as a whole just because now i have a set of tools that does exactly what i want as opposed to hunting for one of maya's built in solutions that usually misses a few steps anyway. . .if you need help with mel at all, lemme know.