.eternal

About

Marc started programming in BASIC on his Commodore 64 at the age of 9 when games became too expensive to purchase. Fortunately, back in those days computers came with manuals that explained the insides, and Marc soon progressed from BASIC to Assembly. One of his crowning achievements on the C64 was writing an assembler in BASIC.

Through his high school career, Marc lost touch with programming a bit as newer computers were too pricey, and the old C64 had lost its sparkle. He did learn some Pascal at school during computer classes, and won several awards at local computer programming competitions by using BASIC to solve the programming problem (without the need to declare variables and functions) while others were using Pascal.

Upon going to university Marc studied a B.Sc in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (little of which he remembers). His biggest disappointment was the need to study (seemingly) unrelated subjects like Physics in order to complete his degree. Here he learnt some more Pascal, C++, Java and ASP (using VBScript, of which he is very ashamed).

He went on to complete an honours year in Compter Science. He is now about 10% through writing up a Masters proposal (and keeps on moving the cheese).

Upon leaving University, he was fortunate to be offered a position as a programmer in a startup IT (read as website development) company in Port Elizabeth called (eventually, after many hours of debate) E-Technik. His first major project was to develop the E-Technik site itself, which has since undergone 5 major revisions and is still using the same back-end (Update: a few more revisions, and a new back-end). His second major project was a db project which he decided to tackle using Visual Basic, since that is what the other programmer was using. In retrospect, he would have used C++, but that is another matter entirely. Hind sight is always 20-20. He went on to develop a shareware program in Visual Basic as well, but has had the fortune of being able to develop the second version using C++ (MinGW).

During his three and a half years (Update: six years) at E-Technik he has developed several versions of a website back-end now known (internally, usually only by himself, as PWUI (Update: now simply E-Technik.Web, and written in C# on .Net 1.1), and has even started it completely from scratch in order to remove the VBScript and use JScript instead. He has also managed to write the JScript in such a way that it is intuitively object oriented, by using code to replicate inheritance.

He has developed projects using C, C++, Win32 API, MFC, ATL, WTL, STL, COM, SQL (on MS SQL Server), more VB and VBScript. He is currently looking into PHP, Perl, MySQL and COM, and is using MinGW (Dev-Cpp) as his primary development environment (Update: C#, VB.Net, SharpDevelop). Learning languages and programming techniques is his passion, and he is investigating developing a custom scripting language (which is easily extensible, object-oriented and strongly typed (although variants will be included)).

He also likes to speak about himself in the third person and tends to use “Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious” in his sig on forums.