GUI

I was so hot to trot at the start to learn a GUI framework because I didn't count anything as "real programming" unless it looked like the "real programs" I use on a day-to-day basis. Now that I'm hobbling along with the basics (buttons, text, input) I realize two things: you can't easily tack on a UI to an existing set of functions, and there is nothing "real" about any large enough toolkit/framework.

On the first point I suppose I could have written PE7 differently that more heavily compartmentalized the prime detector function and the part where it counts the first N primes and kept them separate from any UI related code. That's certainly a goal of the next time I do this.

On the second point I'm trying to say that despite all the fancy things in the code I never had to manually allocate memory or do anything too complicated because the framework had all these canned functions for me. I bet it's really easy to be a programmer stuck in one or two APIs and over time lose general programming skills.

I still have never coded a linked list or a queue or a stack or any other advanced data structure. I've never even encountered a problem that would require that! I'd hate to artificially shoehorn one into a PE problem.