John Montgomery has asked the question – how did you learn to program? I think it all started when my parents gave me LEGO as a young child. I would sit there for hours and build little spaceships and buildings which needed to support their own weight. That might not sound like programming but there are lots of similarities.
- You get an idea to build something.
- You start building it, you encounter problems.
- You solve problems and finish construction.
There was no rigid specification process when I built LEGO spaceships, thats something that I had to put up with when I started working as a software developer – I’m not saying its a bad thing, but its not as insanely enjoyable as starting building something and being surprised how it turned out.
Of course – at some point in time I did get my hands on a computer, and the computers that cut my teeth on were:
In the case of the TRS-80 I’m not sure how I ever figured out how to program on it, I just seemed to be able to make it do things, I can’t remember ever reading a system manual on it, and the Internet didn’t really exist for me back then. In the case of the Commodore 64 I managed to learn enough reading the supplied system manuals to write little text based adventure games.
Occasionally I did get magazines with code listings which I would type in (with errors) but for the most part I just used them to learn the language constructs. It was always fun trying to translate the BASIC listings from the MicroBee variant to C64.
I think the environment for learning how to program these days is very different. You can boot up a machine now and just use your mouse – back then you turned on the computer and it just sat their blinking at you waiting for you to give it a “command”.
So maybe a lot of the people in the field today learnt how to program out of necessity?