Working in the tech industry day in, day out, we can become jaded to the reality of just how cool programming actually is. As humans, we've figured out how to get inanimate objects to calculate things for us:
I can vaguely remember how it felt the first time I wrote a program. I took C++ class and a Java class in high school and I think I took the Java class first. I remember that the syntax didn't make any sense to me at the time but I thought it was really cool how you could type something into the command line and your program could take your input and manipulate it and return a result.
I was really into creating text-based games and GUIs seemed way too advanced to even consider learning. I'm sure that's influenced my programming preferences today, as I still stick with languages that I mostly interact with through the command line (not too much web / graphical work for me).
Then, everyone got Xanga accounts (remember that, USA people?) and was trying to customise their profiles, so I started learning HTML and CSS. There were so many acronyms for different kinds of "cutting edge" web design at the time: XHTML, DHTML, etc. It all seems so quaint now.
What was your first coding experience like? Was it decades ago or last month? Was it nerve-wracking or exciting?
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I started with Python, learning on my own, but I didnt get too far. It was frustrating, I didn't see the point on programming, but no giving up!
6 months later I started a course on crossplatform development: C#, WinForms and WPF a bit later... and was magical. Since that moment, sharing my passion, that feeling with my first experience... is my objective.
My first coding experience was when I started customizing pages on Neopets & Geocities. I honestly didn't even know what I was doing at the time, I just wanted to create pretty pages.
October 1985 I got this issue of MAD in the mail. I was ten. I managed to get the program transcribed onto an apple II. Although I lacked the vocabulary to name what I was doing, in my second go around, I ported the program to a Texas instruments TI-99/4A when I realized that although BASIC would work, variations of the language required figuring out why the program wouldn't run. Basically a bitmap, the program was intentionally tedious, get it, ha ha? but produced an image map of Alfred.
I was about 11 years old when I got an old computer with a green on black text display called Genie II. I programmed a Lotto number generator in Basic. My parents did not program and found it pretty amazing and I was soo proud!
No winning numbers?
I think we actually won 5 Deutsche Mark once back then...
I had the code from a book from a library. I was full of of small programs and games and you had to read and type and try to avoid typos. It was basically google/SO... but way slower 😎
Around 1985 (I was 5), besides POKEing values to change the background colours my first real attempt was to copy a listing from some C64 Basic book to have a game shooting targets on the screen. It was about 8 pages of densely packed basic code and I entered everything carefully.
It didn't work. Nothing appeared on the screen but it didn't error out either. I realised that the cause could be anywhere in the code I just spent an hour or so typing in and that I didn't actually understand what it was doing.
Given the screenshot in the book of essentially a simple target on screen I didn't feel it was really worth spending more time with it but I still felt satisfied that it started at all. Code was running and doing something. This was the (first and) last time I copied over code from printed media though.
I was 11 and it was 1969. I sat at home writing out BASIC code ready to transcribe it on to the teletype machine in my school linked to a mainframe about 10 miles away.
It was my all-singing all-dancing moon-lander game. It didn't work. Of course it didn't. And it was the first time I hit the wall in coding trying to do something far beyond my abilities. Definitely not the last :-)
But I never stopped. And here I am, 50 years later, writing code for a living. (Website back-end stuff - don't ask me to design anything :-) )
Kids today have it easy! I'm glad I never had to use punch cards.
Punched cards, punched tape, coding by marking formatted cards - I've done it all :-)
I've even had to bootstrap a clean PDP mini by writing and then keying-in the code to make the tape-reader work - using physical switches on the main panel.
It's a humbling experience.
Have you seen this short film by Ellis Kropotchev?
I did a little Basic on a Vic20, but programming really clicked for me when I saw a variable used in Pascal. Oh the potential I recognised.
My brother and I started coding with the warcraft 3 map editor. Gosh it was really fun to see how the units moved by themselves, the events triggered, the missions worked and how our ~bad~ voice played in the dialogs.
We wrote two little campaigns and expended 3++ month with each one.
Warcraft 3 and it's expansion the Frozen Throne are good games.
When I used to be six I went with my mother to a 2nd hand store and I always focused on some game, going through the requirements and getting something that interested me now and then, and so I've played a huge amount of games.
What is really fun is adding new functionality and/or understanding it to some degree, hence modding. There are even some projects which can create offspring and cascade into other projects like something with CS and TF.
The modding community seems to foster when games have great popularity and it's not too frictions to go about changing things.
So essentially like what you describe with the campaigns it's essentially getting comfortable what's around you and using what you can to express/tell something or just create a different kind of environment for the game, which is pretty cool all in all.
Essentially it increases the replay value of a game, which it turns makes it so that you're getting a lot more for your money spend.
I think that people feel satisfied when they get to create something and for their creation to have impact or give new perspective on something. Like how you state it.
That's why I am in part learning programming, so I can exercise my minds visualizations, to be close to the problem and surpass it being able to create solutions for my ideas and other peoples problems.
The less friction there is, and the simpler it is to implement what you want and others might need, the more fun it is.
Working with games, emulators, retros also opens you up to all sort of new technologies. Learning how to set up things, how things are set up, what code relates to which configs etc.
So fundamentally if you see someway of creating positive impact for yourself or others, you probably should take it as long as you know how to have leverage in proper proportions. Everybody can work on a single thing, and as a team come together and create something that exceeds them (hence why you should have teams in the first place).
Assuming instead that you would be one man operation. It's tougher but it can greatly increase your capabilities to do things, and go through many learning curves being able to do what you want to do.
That's really cool that you and your brother got to do that together! Does he still code?
Yes! He works as a dba! :D
We both did the same university career heheh
What was that?
Wrote my first ever "Hello World" in Turbo C++. I felt powerful! For the next 4 years of my C and C++ mussing, I started critically examining every program which could be run on the terminal, wondering how it would have been coded, without realising that there are a lot many languages which can be used to make programs which run on terminals.
I was naive.
Turbopascal at school in 2000 or 2001. I hated it and deselected "Computer science" for the next class.
TURBO Pascal sounds much more exciting than boring regular Pascal.
But it isn't.
Agree but you lucky I also had Prolog :) What reconciliates me with coding was ... assembly language because it could do amazing things like parallel programming and our teacher shows us how with a visual method called graphcet fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafcet
It's unfortunate nobody nearly knows it. Maybe one day I'll do something ;)
For me, it was Python that brought me back :)
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