Freecasts

When students are bored in class, they do many things. Some sleep, some text, some play video games on their laptops, some read, and some do homework. I, like every other student, get bored in class. However, when I got bored in class, I did none of these things. Instead, I write programs. Or at least, I used to.
Since 9th grade, I have always brought at least one laptop to school. Why more than one laptop you ask? That is a topic for a future blog post, but if you really want to know, you can leave a comment. Anyway, I always bring my laptop to school where I am part of the ever expanding number of students who bring their personal computers to class. However, while many of the students who choose to bring laptops bring them just to check their Facebook, check their email (if they aren’t all ready doing that on their phones), instant message, and play video games in school, I use my laptop (for lack of a better phrase) for good. That is to say that I use my laptop in school for schoolwork. This is because I have two problems that basically kills any hope of me taking notes by hand: I have some of the worst handwriting that has ever been seen (this does not include writing seen on prescription pads), and I am a very disorganized person. However, with a computer, I am able to take notes quickly (I can type a lot faster than I can write), legibly, and once I was done taking notes, I could put them in a place where I could find them again. While I am not so bold as to say that my laptop, once in school, stayed doing schoolwork, usually it did.
Last year was an excellent year for my programming. Because I was quite advanced for a couple of my classes, I learned how to make amazing Quartz Composer compositions, I wrote amazing AppleScript programs, and I started to learn PHP. Programming allowed me to take a break from the boredom of portions of some of my classes while still allowing me to expand my mind. Thus, while I still felt bad that I wasn’t paying attention, at least I was learning something. Things were looking bright for next year. However, I would soon come face to face the hell that programming on Windows was.
I never knew that I had it so easy when I programmed the Mac (up until my Asus, which I will review later, all my laptops had been Macs). On the Mac, you can get your programming feet wet with Automator, move up to AppleScript, and then if you want, a host of more advanced languages including but not limited to Cocoa and Carbon. On the Mac, you can program in open source languages such as Perl, Python, and Java. On the Mac, you get amazing tools like Quartz Composer. On the Mac, you get a ton of sample projects and code for each language. And most importantly, on the Mac, all of these things are free.
Lets compare that to Windows. After shelling out a ton of money for Visual Studio, you get no sample code (that I could find), you get no starter language (for me a starter language is a programming language that requires you to write code, but the syntax is just as easy, if not easier, to understand than AppleScript), you get no open source languages, and you get nothing that compares to Quartz Composer.
I find this quite depressing. It almost seems that Microsoft, realizing that more programs run on their platform than on Apple’s platform, seems to want to keep their number from growing greatly. It probably would not cost them much to throw in a copy of Visual Studio in the box with every copy of Windows sold. I think that by setting the price as high as it is, including no sample code, including no starter language, and alienating open source languages, Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot while Apple is embracing the many new programmers that are created by a bit of boredom in Chemistry class.