Mininal skills

[@lbutlr]

On 03 Jun 2020, at 15:54, Brandon Helsley <brandon.helsley at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I've searched around FreeBSD documentation and have found that most of the contributions require at least minimal programming skills. My question is whether or not there is anything I can contribute or maintain for freebsd without any skills.

Documentation. Read it, find errors, find things that seem unclear. The cosumentation could be quite a lot better in general.

> What direction should I take my education if I wish to be able to maintain a port. Is c++ programming required? What else is required?

For ports., most ports are still written in perl, python, and C (not necessarily in that order), so programming skill in those languages, or at least the language of the port you want to maintain.

Of course, you also need to understand the syntax for Makefile which is almost a language unto itself.

If you are not a programmer and want to be, the best languages to learn are the languages that are being used right now the most. That would be python (much as it pains me to say as I really really hate python), Java, and JavaScript (the last two sound related, but they are not).

Sure, there are lots of the languages (rust, go, perl, swift, php, C, C++, C#, ObjC, etc etc) but when starting off learning, pick to languages that are current and popular and learn them well.

After that, if you need a different language it is relatively easy to pick it up.

If you just want to be a programmer for the sake of making money, learn COBOL. Even bad COBOL programmers can make US$100,000yr.


-- 
I know it all. I just can't remember it simultaneously.