Programmers' Pets

Most professional programmers I know regard programming not only as a way of living but it is their hobby too. Writing programs is such a tremendous experience, that programmers continue doing it in their sparetime. The only difference is that they write their pet applications. Ordinary people keep cats, dogs or other animals as pets, programmers keep pet applications. The pet application can be useless to others and we write it just for the pleasure of creation. If we have to learn a new programming language we often recreate our pet application first.

Just as ordinary people keep different pets, programmers have different pet applications, often more than one at any time. Programmers pets can be anywhere in the area of graphics, communication, database or operating system. Usually these pet applications are known only by the friends and the colleagues of the programmer, but sometimes they grow and become something unusual.

One example is the "Hello world!" program. Its origin is unknown and it became the pet of almost all authors of books on programming languages. (Search Delphi - or any other programming language tools - for the expression "Hello world" to see. The probability of this string occurs somewhere accidentally is less than 0.000000000000000001).

But undeniably the most successful pet application is Linux by Linus Torvald.

My favourite pet application is WStar. I wrote the earliest version in Basic while I was in high scool. Then I adapted it to almost all computers I encountered and recreated it in all the programming languages I learned. I wrote it in Basic, Pascal, C, PL1, Algol, Fortran, assembler and several scripting languages. It worked on ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, some ancient Atari computer whose name I do not remember, and of course on PCs. Naturally when a I started learning how to write programs under Windows I wrote a Windows version too. Later I changed it to use object oriented language, and added new features. When I recreated it as a Delphi component it was the first time I really felt that my pet is living and really belongs to me. Placing several WStar component on a new form and changing their parameters was an entirely new experience.

Sometimes we treat our pet applications more badly as any living pet. We abandon them for years, half finish some (if not all) versions, and almost never document and debug them they way we should. Once we learned the basics of a new programming language using our pet, we forget it and start writing a more boring application which we (hopefuly) will be payed for.

By writing this article I want to give justice to my favourite pet application. I commented almost every lines of it and published it here as a freeware. I do not really care if you like it or not. If you like it send me an email, if not just delete it. But stop and think a moment for your pet. You do have a pet, don't you?

Written by Pintér Gábor
Székesfehérvár, Kriványi u. 15.
H-8000, HUNGARY
Tel: +36 30 3489752, Fax: +36 22 304326
Email: propix@propix.hu
Web: http://www.propix.hu