Computers…
After the little get-together with Colene, Nelson and Ms. Fubsy last night, I started rebuilding my development/staging server at home. It got me thinking about my start in computers, more specifically what programming language did it for me? The one where I said, “Yea, this could work for me. I can do this.”
If I recall correctly, the first language that I was completely facinated with was BASIC. It was simple and logical, the syntax wasn’t the best in terms of logic, branching and loops but it worked. I was 9 years old and I took a BASIC programming summer course in my grade school. I remember my instructor was very funny and very passionate. First lesson in endless loops?
10 print "Hello, Ritchie!"
20 goto 10
After, I remember logo (which was really more of a graphics app) and building a stick figure house (complete with barbed wire fencing and flower beds) with my mom for homework.
Eventually, I was hacking up custom scripts to manage my short-lived BBS. C/C++ code to perform mind-reading games and eventually Object Oriented Java. Wow, admittedly that’s pretty geeky! It wouldn’t be very far-fetched to assume that my one and true friend was my computer at the time and a 28.8 baud modem. Today, there’s a lot: php, ruby, python and perl, etc.
In short, really there wasn’t really one absolute language that hooked me in. It was a combination of things over a period of time.
12:28 pm
Comments on this post
i loved basic in high school. it was so easssssssy! now i get pretty messed up just looking at html, let alone anything else. just pad ritchie! we should crash it more often. this time i won’t step on the pad.
Hey, Ritchie!! I have a C programming class this sem (Data Structures and Algorithms I). Will you help me?
BTW, I sailed through my Web and Database Programming class last sem and finished with an A so solid that I could have flunked the final and still gotten an A! Thank you much for all of your help in that class! I need you again this sem! Please help me!!
p.s. You mentioned 9 yrs old and that brought some memories back to me. We used to learn BASIC in computer class at my elementary school in the Philippines. It was so fun!
Heh… that sounds very similar to my story. Dad is a teacher and used to bring home Apple//e’s over the summer. When I was nine, he brought one home, and with it a book on BASIC programming. Then I worked in LOGO, then I was hacking around with scripts in [Mac Terminal software of yesterday] Red Ryder and White Knight terminal programs to write my own BBS — it even had doors! (Ha, “doors”.. haven’t said that in years). Now it’s HTML and Perl and Javascript and AJAX and and Java and Objective-C with some straight C thrown in there for good measure
Thanks for this post, brought back some good memories.