That’s why professionals use XML or JSON for this kind of projects and SQL for that kind of projects. And sometimes even both. It simply depends on the kind of problem to solve.

I’m glad that I live in the EU. I don’t even remember when I got my last spam call, that was many years ago.

That’s why I work with an extraordinary diligence to avoid making errors from the very start. Debugging is only a measure of last resort.

One of the key problems of learning VHDL at universities is that most teachers there are amazingly clueless about the language. Not only do you need a bit of a different mindset (you do not program, you define), but their knowledge of language and systems is stuck in the last century.

When I was a regular in a VHDL group on the site we don’t mention here, we regularly had students who got taught techniques that are obsolete or at least deprecated since 1989.

Heisenbug. Nasty buggers, especially in my domain: Embedded Engineering. When you are in the debugger, the whole processor is stopped, missing tons of data coming in, missing interrupts, getting network timeouts, etc. More often than not, resuming makes no sense, and you have to get straight to reboot.

I don’t make money with it, on the contrary - my son is a bit more direct here and claims I’m wasting money ;-) It is just a hobby. OK, a big one. I build my own models for fun and exhibit them at shows and events.

And: Curiosity is good. It kept the human race advancing.

No, the project is still in its early stages, far from what I would publish.

Regarding the amount of LEGO, well, if I write a resource management and inventory system, you can imagine that it is a bit more than a handfull. My current estimates are around one million bricks, give or take a few hundred k. One of the reason to inventorize it…

Indeed. I have done languages like Prolog and Forth, too, and have actually written a bit in APL ages ago. Yes, they are different, but in the end, it just adds a little bit of complexity. The underlying algorithms are universal, just the methods and structures to achieve them differ. Actually, the first programming language I have written was a simplified Forth derivate - in 6510 Assembler.

The software gets data from a website named bricklink.com, where one can buy and sell LEGO bricks and sets.

The main view holds a list of bricks I’ve selected from the large range available. In a requester to add parts, I can select a certain brick from the list of existing bricks by first chosing a category (e.g. “Bricks”) in the leftmost column, then chosing it’s shape (e.g. “Brick 2x4”) in the middle one, and then selecting the color (of the known existing colors for this brick, e.g. “Black”) in the right column. On all three selections I can multi-select and sort, which allows me to select e.g. a number of different Bricks, then sort the last view by color, and multiselect those bricks in the color I need. OK’ing the requester add the part(s) to my list.

The list that shows all the properties (including when this part was in production, how much a single brick of it weighs, as well as mold codes and article numbers). From there, I can choose some bricks (usually 15 in a go) to print, which produces a PDF with 15 labels on a double-sided A4-paper with cut-marks on one side. I cut them along the cut marks and put them into the bag with the coresponding part. This is quite helpful, if you consider a box with bags all containing e.g. black parts and bad lighting conditions in the storage room. Alternatively, I can print a double-sided paper with four larger cards to cut, which I laminate and use for marking boxes when I have larger amounts of one brick shape and color.

I can (and do) export those bricks to an export folder as CSV once I’ve printed the labels. In a future version of the software, I will be able to take a bag or box of parts from my collection, select it in my software via it’s article number, and derive an approximate count by weighing them (therefor the parts weight) to get an approximate inventory.

Learning how to get models and views together took some time, but after the second refactoring that week I managed to have neat objects for each MVC with clean interfaces. My biggest source in the app defines a requester with three columns of lists: a global category, then parts from that category, and finally the available colors for that part. Each of those views is an object, their interacting logic is an object, and finally the actual requester is an object, and this makes thing easy to handle.

Yes, I have my share of coworkers asking me when they run into problems, too. They even ask me when they have Windows problems. And I don’t do Windows - I do Linux and embedded systems.

I’ve seen way worse. Imagine a project that uses C preprocessor structures to make a C-compiler provide a kind-of C++. Macros that are pages long, and if you forget a single bracket anywhere, your ten pages look like a romance novel.

Or VHDL synthesis messages. You’ve got no real control over them, 99.9% of the warnings are completely irrelevant, but one line in a 50k lines output could hint at a problem - if you only found it.

So far, the output of C or C++ compilers (except for the above-mentioned project) has not been a problem or me, but I’m doing this for about 40 years now, so I’ve got a bit of experience.

After you’ve done some languages, they all look the same. Yes, some have interesting features like the indent-based blocking of Python, and I’ll have to look up if the new language has “else if”, “elsif”, “elif”, or whatever, but als long as it is coming from the family of ALGOL-like languages, it does not matter much. You’ll learn the basic functions needed to get around, and off you go.

Just a few weeks ago, I started learning Python. Yes, this indenting takes some time to get used to. My son does Python for about a year now - he started with it at university. Maybe ten days after I started learning, I invited him to have a look at my first Python program. I have no idea what he expected. A “Hello, World” with a few extra features, maybe? Definitely not the 2.5k lines app I had written in my spare time, with GUI, databases, harvesting data from a web site with caching, and creating PDF files with optimized layout for the data I processed. In the end, it was just another programming language.

Luckily, I was not ingrained by my first programming language like that, or my coworkers would strangle me.

I started with BASIC, which allowed only two letters for variable names…

Just remove Windows. One problem less on the list.

Nothing special. It was a natural progression to move from UNIX, Solaris, SunOS, and VMS to Linux.

Yes, but those were only two distict flavors, and both had a lot of pull. And those special instructions were only needed in special applications and drivers. With RISC-V we are talking about a dozen different flavors, all by small and mostly insignificant players and the commands that extend the basic command set are commands for quite common operations. Which is a totally different scenarion than the SSE/3DNow issue back then.

Actually, I think RISC-V is even worse than ARM. With ARM, at least you have a quite reliable instruction set on the CPU. With RISC-V, most vendors have their own extensions of the instruction set, which opens a big can of worms: Either you compile all your stuff for your own CPU, or you have a set of executables for each and every vendors flavor of RISC-V commands, or you exclusively use the RISC-V core commands. The first would be only for hardcore geeks, the second would be a nightmare to maintain, and the third would be not really efficient. Either way, it sucks.

While I have to maintain an old Windows 7 box to run some ancient software on it, I do most of my development work on a Linux machine. I use LibreOffice to read and write documents, use Inkscape for drawings in my documntation, but first and foremost, my main IDE is Linux native (although a Windows port does exist).

As long as countries like China, North Korea, Myanmar, Russia, or the USA don’t care, he has quite some travelling options.