Thanks. : )

And, yes, more than subtle really. I have stated a few times that I am female on various threads.

At some point, you'll just have to change the title to Female Software Engineer.

To all you coders, how would I go about learning to code things? I'm interested in it but I don't know how to start.

Not sure where you fall into line when it comes to weighing in on things like this, but what do you usually ask/look for when you are looking at new team members? And if it's something you have lying around and don't care about sharing (if even just some of it) what sort of test questions do you usually hit people with? I always like to test myself with these when I find em. I can't remember the site, but they had a problem posted that if you could put up a solution to, they would hire you solely based on that.

My BS in Software Engineering got me into a semi-game programming position for about two years before the company died (conveniently right as, but not related to, the economy crashing). I ended up becoming an iOS programmer, which pays ridiculously good money for it's relative difficulty. I feel totally out of touch now choking down Objective C though and hope someday I'll get back to something interesting, or at least convince someone to let me rebuild whatever I can in OpenGL ES.

They're ashamed of showing themselves because of the hideously optimized AIR client.

More specifically I meant that I don't know enough about the specifics and inner workings of the education system to fairly assess what's wrong with it or how it could be fixed. There are undoubtedly a lot of things that could be improved, but why are they that way in the first place? There are probably reasons that are not easy to get around or smart people would have solved them a long time ago. However, I don't know what those reasons are. I do know that "just fixing it" is never as easy as it seems with complex systems like education and government. We can talk pie-in-the-sky about it if you like, but my point was merely that I don't know what the real problems are or what would serve as viable solutions to them. As an example, national test scores have been declining over the years, but why? Are we getting dumber as a people, are the tests too outdated and irrelevant to the context of modern life, are students having to deal with too much stress or other distractions outside of school, are teachers getting worse or caring less, are schools underfunded? It could be any or all of the above, and those are just some things I made up as hypotheses, but I really have no idea what the answer is.

A few people have asked this question throughout this thread, and you can find various responses if you look back through the posts. One was a resource Zydion posted:

Objective C isn't too bad. The major hurdles are realizing you have no stack for you objects (there's ARC at least) and function signatures are just weird. And no namespaces. Or type safety. Or private functions. Or multiple inheritance.

It's honestly not too bad. Depending on the nature of your application, the different levels of frameworks aren't too bad. Like UIKit is a breeze if you're not doing anything too fancy visually.

Xcode (which is Mac only) is really the only way to go unless you don't care too much about an IDE. You can write pure C++ or Objective C++ (you have to follow some rules when mixing the classes) as well.

Since Apple lifted their restrictions on other languages being compiled for iOS, you can build things in MonoTouch as well, though I've never really messed with that.

Edit: Also be careful with open source code. Anything under the GPL is going to get you denied =/

I'm very much a "pie-in-the-sky" sort of talker. I love such conversations. Of course, a solution to the mentioned coding dilemma would be a fair compromise if you don't want to get all idealistic ;-)

Good to know its not just me I guess :/