Focus Development Limited A: Fill & Download for Free

Visual Studio Community edition (which is functionally equivalent to Visual Studio Professional edition, the only difference being licensing details) is a completely free download and is what many many professional developers use. The Community edition can be used for open source development, educational purposes, and even commercial development (limited to individuals, small teams, organizations under a certain revenue size). Check the license agreement for details.If you want to write in C, create your project as if you were going to set up a C++ project, but name your source files with a .C extension. This will cause them to be compiled assuming C syntax. Files with .CPP extensions are assumed to be C++ source code.Note that Microsoft has focused on keeping C++ more up-to-date with the standards, but has not fully implemented the C standards in the C compiler. So, for example, not every C99 feature is implemented in the C compiler, and might not be in the future unless there is significant customer demand for the feature and/or there is a change of policy. In practice, I have not found this to be a significant issue.In addition to C and C++ support, Visual Studio Community provides C#, F#, VB, etc.

The goal of a language designer is NOT to make it easy-to-use or quick-to-type, although those are indeed subordinate considerations. A good language should encourage best practices, prevent ambiguity, assist in reusability, make programs that are easy to understand and maintain, facilitate enhancements and debugging, and telegraph the programmer's intent well enough that the compiler can optimize the generated code appropriately.Just as an electrical engineer draws schematic diagrams and an architect creates technical drawings, neither one simply cobbling together a rough sketch, a programming language is designed with certain objectives that are highly DESIREABLE. They are NOT intended to be difficult, but neither are they focused primarily on being easy.Newbies always seem to want the compiler to ingest plain English. That is a very bad idea. It has been done, many times, and those languages are never big successes. Of course it IS possible to design a language that is fairly simple and has a brief learning curve, like Smalltalk, but for some reason such languages have never taken the lead.And it would be nice if there were a USER language (versus a programmer language) that was easier than Bash/Batch/etc. so that users could automate common tasks.

If you ask this question to 20 different people, you’ll get 20 different answers.Some will say to completely ditch your weaknesses and focus on strengths.Others will say that fixing weaknesses is the only way to go.I say that there is a time and place for both.If you have a big strength that can take you far in life, make it your only focus and become a master. If there’s nothing holding you back, take that strength and run with it.However, there are two times that you should shift your focus on fixing your weaknesses.Here they are:SCENARIO 1: YOUR WEAKNESS AFFECTS YOUR SELF CONFIDENCEAfter I had been working out for about a year, I learned that I made a grave mistake.Even though I was making serious gains in my upper body, I had completely neglected my lower body.Hitting chest and arms and back came natural to me but hitting legs didn’t, so I stopped doing them.This wasn’t a big issue until I started playing rugby.For those of you who don’t know, the shorts you wear to play rugby are very short, like mid-thigh short. I don’t know why they are like this but they are.What this means is that if you have big strong legs, you look like a badass. But if you have scrawny legs, you look like a noodle.I looked like a noodle…and it was very embarrassing.I was so embarrassed with my legs that I wore longer shorts to practice and before games, trying my best to not have to reveal my big weakness.It affected my confidence.When your weakness affects your internal confidence, it’s time to focus on it.From then on, I changed my mindset. Not only was I going to attack this weakness, I was going to turn this weakness into a strength.So I began hitting legs multiple times a week. At first, each day was an internal struggle. But I kept telling myself that this was going to be one of my strongest assets.And as I kept going and started making progress, I noticed that I started looking forward to leg day because each time it was a battle with myself.Now, legs are one of my strongest body parts and my favorite day at the gym.If you have a weakness that causes you to be embarrassed or lacking in confidence, attack it until it becomes your biggest strength.SCENARIO 2: YOUR WEAKNESS LIMITS A STRENGTHOne of my biggest strengths is coming up with cool ideas.I love thinking deeply about the world around me and finding interesting concepts to help people become their best selves.That’s what I started writing— to share these ideas.But after a couple months of writing for my blog, I found myself limited…not by my ideas, but by my typing.I had never actually learned how to type! Up to that point in life, I had to look at the keys while typing and peck at each key with one of my index fingers.This made it take hours to write one article and was very frustrating.My weakness of typing was limiting my strength for ideas.So I set out to correct this weakness by using a free typing program everyday for several weeks.Each day I would hammer through the lessons and re-do any lesson that I didn’t get an excellent score on.Within a couple weeks, I was able to type without looking. Not fast, mind you, but without looking.A couple more weeks of hardcore practice and I was now typing at around 50 words per minute—nothing mind-blowing, but enough to that I was no longer limited. Now it only took me about 30 minutes to write up an article from start to finish.By fixing this weakness, I was able to better take advantage of my strength.Your strengths are what you are naturally better at and will most likely be what bring you the most success and joy in life.However, if you have a weakness that affects your confidence or that limits a strength, that isn’t okay.By taking the time and effort to fix this weakness, you’ll gain more pride in yourself and you’ll clear the path to let your strength shine.