Yes! this was about 12 years ago, when I was just a little 10 year old girl. I was very lazy even back then. And the funny thing is, even after 12 years, I still havenβt changed!
My dad wanted me to become an engineer, so he got me a PC. He thought I would learn coding on it⦠but little did he know, I was actually preparing to become a gamer.
After getting a PC, I used to play games day and night. I neither studied nor did any other work. Seeing this, my dad found it really strange. He often wondered, βWill this girl ever be able to fulfill my dream?β And honestly, at that time, the answer was a definite no. I had wasted an entire year because of gaming. My dad thought that I had to do something now, but what seemed easy from the outside was actually not that easy.
Once, while I was playing a game, my dad came to me and said, Thereβs an event where 19 children are participating. You donβt have to do anythingβjust write the βHello Worldβ code in Java.
I really liked participating in competitions, but being an introvert, I made a mistake. I had practiced for it at home as well, but when I sat in front of all those people, I made a mistake in my code. I could have solved it, but my fear increased so much that I couldnβt think of anything at that moment.
Just like when we turn off the lights at night and run because we feel like some ghost is chasing us , I was feeling exactly the same way. I was so scared that my brain literally stopped working. And in the end, the code wouldnβt run either, so I just gave up. The code won, I lost.
So, I went home and wrote my first βHello, World!β programβbecause my ego had been hurt. Thatβs how I took my first step into programming.
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}
}
Top comments (7)
Yeah correctly memorizing
public static void main(String[] args)the first time around is indeed an impressive feat (and I'm not even being sarcastic)!Remember how we went from writing C/C++ to writing Java and all yelling "my god this is so easy!!" ? And then J2EE (Java Enterprise) came on the scene - how quickly those "it's so easy!!" feelings evaporated ;-)
Oh, absolutely! C/C++ had already tested our patience, then Java came along and we thought, βFinally! Weβve figured out programming!β
And then J2EE quietly walked in like, βOh really? Youβre feeling confident?β π
We memorized
public static void main(String[] args)and suddenly thought we had unlocked the secrets of software engineering. π€£ Then enterprise Java taught us that knowing the syntax and actually understanding a system are two completely different things.Looking back, that whole βJava is so easy!β phase was probably one of programmingβs greatest illusions.
Programming gave us confidence first; J2EE gave us character development later. π€£
Haha yes :-)
Java on the frontend (applets, remember them?) was more or less completely useless - I think the point of those applets was to draw people in, like "look how cool this is!" ;-)
Where Java truly became a 'force factor' was on the backend - J2EE, and later Spring ...
Spring was a bit more lightweight, but still REALLY complex with all those components you had to wire together via these gruesome XML files ...
And my god how over-engineered it all was, with these class loaders and with endless "patterns" and abstractions on top of abstractions on top of abstractions ...
I made very decent money being a Java dev for years, but I didn't really regret moving on to more lightweight languages/frameworks!
Java, the new COBOL :-)
This reminded me a lot of my own journey π
I actually started coding in 6th grade after getting interested because my brother, who was in 7th grade at the time, was building websites.
From there, I got completely hooked. I started learning web development and eventually built quite a few projects β 2 social media platforms with Node.js, 2 generative AI models in Python, a Quora clone, a link-in-bio platform, a link shortener, a Coolors clone, a cdnjs clone, and a bunch of other random things.
The funny (and slightly painful) part is that most of these projects barely got any users β usually around 30β50. And whenever I saw those numbers, instead of trying to improve them, I would just delete the project and move on π
Looking back, I think building the projects was never really the hard part for me. Learning how to get people to actually use them β and having the patience to keep going when nobody does β was the real challenge.
Still, I guess all those βfailedβ projects taught me something. And honestly, I probably wouldnβt have learned nearly as much without building and deleting all those things along the way.
The pink Godzilla roaring on the cover β is that a hint that Godzilla is actually a girl? Hahaha.
The experience you described at the start is pretty much the same as mine, except it was me who brought up buying a computer at home. My reason was that I could use it for studying. And yeah, back when I wanted a cartridge-based Famicom, I'd told my parents it was for learning English too. So when the computer finally arrived, the first thing I did was download an online game called MU and start playing. Then all kinds of games after that β Resident Evil, Call of Duty, Half-Life, Red Alert, Age of Empires, StarCraft, the Ys series. Basically, if my first laptop could run it, I tried it.
To be honest, I didn't seriously learn programming until college, and it really only took off after my first year of working. Before that I'd just done "hello world" in a bunch of languages. I always hated how tedious Java was, and loved how elegant Python is.
Really enjoyable article β made me reminisce for a long while. /woof
Wait, is your vacation over already? Hahahaπ€£
Wow, this is such a motivating story. I really liked the part about ego.
For someone who claims to be lazy, refusing to let Hello World win twelve years ago. is a suspicious amount of persistence. π