Comments on: Nobody told me it’s impossible, so I did it.

By: Raymond

Raymond — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 05:29:53 +0000

I guess I’m older than dirt. :(
I started programing with an Altair 8800 with a blazing fast 2 MHz Intel 8080.
The only language available was 8080 machine code.

By: Michael Rakita

Michael Rakita — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:18:52 +0000

Thanks Gerry, great story! IBM S/360 with APL was before my time but I can imagine all that fun you had playing with it. I agree, software is not a science and passion is a must. We are not in the era of 8kB computers and BASIC anymore but think of all options for someone who starts today. Web programming with Ruby, Python or PHP, Windows programming with C# or VB.NET, iPhone or Mac programming with Objective-C, Xbox programming with XNA etc. I’m a little jealous :-)

By: Gerry Hull

Gerry Hull — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:30:59 +0000

Excellent. I’m 51 and a child of the computer generation. In my school days, there were no such things as computer courses or degrees in Computer Science… at least non that I heard of. I certainly did not want to be a mainframe jock!

- In high school, my math teacher asked if I wanted to be in a “computer club”. I was amazed. Sure, why not? Well, it was an after-school gig… The “computer” was an IBM Selectric Typewriter terminal connected via a 110-baud acoustic coupler and telephone to an IBM System/360… The programming language was APL (A Programming Language), which used a special typeball and the Greek character set. APL was (and remains) a very powerful interpretive lanaguage… very simple to multiply a matrix of a millon by millon dimensions (which would delight us and crash the APL session). I was hooked.

In college we had an HP Mini, with 8kB of core… We did BASIC programming on Teletype terminals. The BASIC interpreter had to be loaded via a punched tape (To load the punched tape, you had to do a boot-strap by entering octal into the front panel switches.)… When the professor got a $25K grant to buy a 16kB memory upgrade to the HP Memory, he forgot the HP and bought 15 or 20 Commodore PETs — 64K machines with built in video and Bill Gates’s BASIC! It was AWESOME.

A later college roommate and I bought the Altair 8800 Kit when it came out! S100 Bus and all that cool stuff… plugging in 2102 1Kbit static RAMs… I was in heaven…

It’s 30 years later and I’m still writing code as an individual contributor… many products shipped, lots of success stories… VB.Net is my favorite language, with C# a close second. On Linux, PHP and Ruby.

Have PASSION for programming and you will go places. Software is an ART, not a science. Learn by doing — get a college degree for the the science, but let the PASSION for programming live on.

By: Dinis Cruz

Dinis Cruz — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:38:39 +0000

I think you are missing the point here , learning how to program this way is the ONLY way to really becoming a great programmer :)

Doing those tasks by hand is a very important first step since that is what gave you a very solid understanding of how programming works, and more importantly it allowed you to start visualizing your program in your head.

By: Michael Wales

Michael Wales — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:44:19 +0000

Haha, sounds just like me. I was bored in school (the curriculum was years behind my knowledge level) and would fill sheets and sheets of paper with code, waiting to get home and test. Good times.

By: Steve Merrick

Steve Merrick — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:56:44 +0000

Like many correspondents here, I started programming in much the same way as you describe. Once we’ve established motivation, which I agree is the most important thing, we need to consider how to continue. It took me a long time to pick up the elements of software engineering/craftsmanship, but without them, I would be a Bad Programmer. Learning how to do the job properly matters; enthusiasm alone isn’t enough.

By: DJ

DJ — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:46:38 +0000

Pretty much the same story. Took programming course in BASIC at pretty much the first computer shop in our town in mid-80 during school holiday.

I remember the course was 8:30-10:00 in the morning and my brother and I were pounding on the door at 7:30 waking up the owner/instructor who lived there to let us in so we could spent some time on the computer. There were other courses after ours, so we only got access to computer during those short hours 3x a week.

By: Serkan

Serkan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:05:33 +0000

Same story here, more or less. I’ve started with BASIC too, when my brother bought the book but got bored easily. So I’ve picked it up, and read it several times, programmed my first Tetris game, and never stopped programming since then. :) It was a lot of fun.

But the problem is, and it also gets asked in forums from time to time, what is the BASIC for modern times, that gives the same satisfaction and excitement?

By: RealLateStarter

RealLateStarter — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:39:14 +0000

Dammit! Everyone told me its impossible, and i never did it :(

By: Jonas

Jonas — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:19:22 +0000

Impossible? That’s just silly. What you describe is probably how a whole generation programmers started out. At least I recognize it. I had to learn English too in order to understand the (xeroxed) manual.