I find it fascinating that most people have over a decade's experience of tinkering with computers, writing their own little pieces of code etc before they even enter the job market in their early twenties! Very few other professions can expect this level of experience from people just getting going.
Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
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Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
#42When I read things like this, I end up feeling a lot of sympathy for kids who are trying to learn programming and "computers" nowadays. I count myself as very fortunate that I started learning programming back in the 80's when not much was expected out of computers, since they were so (relatively) underpowered. I feel like I was able to learn programming concepts at a much more leisurely pace than you're expected to…
At the same time, the counterpoint is of course that the 80s (and 90s for most) really required you to read a lot of books. There wasn't really any coding boot camps, tutorials (as they are today), pluralsight etc etc and the chances of meeting another accomplished programmer in real life was fairly low.
Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
#43When I read things like this, I end up feeling a lot of sympathy for kids who are trying to learn programming and "computers" nowadays. I count myself as very fortunate that I started learning programming back in the 80's when not much was expected out of computers, since they were so (relatively) underpowered. I feel like I was able to learn programming concepts at a much more leisurely pace than you're expected to…
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Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
#44When I read things like this, I end up feeling a lot of sympathy for kids who are trying to learn programming and "computers" nowadays. I count myself as very fortunate that I started learning programming back in the 80's when not much was expected out of computers, since they were so (relatively) underpowered. I feel like I was able to learn programming concepts at a much more leisurely pace than you're expected to…
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Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
#45When I read things like this, I end up feeling a lot of sympathy for kids who are trying to learn programming and "computers" nowadays. I count myself as very fortunate that I started learning programming back in the 80's when not much was expected out of computers, since they were so (relatively) underpowered. I feel like I was able to learn programming concepts at a much more leisurely pace than you're expected to…
At the same time, the counterpoint is of course that the 80s (and 90s for most) really required you to read a lot of books. There wasn't really any coding boot camps, tutorials (as they are today), pluralsight etc etc and the chances of meeting another accomplished programmer in real life was fairly low.
> required you to read a lot of books
Actually these kids should be reading all those same books. Coding bootcamps, tutorials, stack overflow and cut-and-paste are the reason there are so many solutions that nobody actually understands.
Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
#46Excessively long? Ah, millennials... perhaps you could abbreviate it down like Fabrice Bellard's site: http://bellard.org/ -- it shouldn't take more than one line to explain things like inventing ffmpeg, qemu, jslinux, writing a 4G LTE base station, and so on. Be sure to check out the "Old projects" as well for greater nostalgia.
Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
#47This is cool. I'm around the same age as you and share a lot of that background. I've wanted to put something like this together for a while, possibly in the format of a timeline on a personal blog. It's also fun to look back at old forum accounts and blogspot posts and think "shit, I was 12 years old when I wrote that!" I remember being going to barnes and noble, picking up a fat "advanced PHP programming" book, and…
My biggest programming regret is not keeping hold of the qbasic stuff I cranked out as a nerdy kid.
I'm my head it was all so effing great (whole games with graphics drawn with the old pen-down, forwards 10, turn 90deg turtle thing!) but I'm certain grown-up me would get a kick out of how utterly abysmal it all was.
Then again, I'm a JS guy, so I still occasionally stumble across sites with code i worked on a few years years ago and weep openly at it.
Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
#48TL;DR - Programming - don't get discouraged, it's hard but possible for anyone really - fun too sometimes! ;) Really great write-up to share with aspiring programmers of all kinds - debunks a lot of stories many of us tell themselves and others ;) I hope for more honest personal stories like these (not only for "programming"?) - always great to read about those. The internet (IRC and forums like HN especially) has al…
hehe, my first years of programming were filled with failure. With 8 years I got a C64 and tried programming on it, but didn't get much going beside some arithmetic and prints. My next gig was mIRC with 15 years. Copied some scripts to get funny colors going and later build some funny chat bots for games or social experiements. Then I did a website with PHP, when I was 16 and had some C in high school were I build 2…
When I was 15 I wrote a game on the BBC Micro and sent it in to one of the computer magazines of the day (this was back in 1991, and while the internet may have existed in the UK, nobody had heard of it).
They rejected it (rightfully).
Recently I found the floppy disk, managed to find someone at work with a KryoFlux and a 5.25" floppy drive, and, miracle of miracles, it was readable.
The next question became: what do you do with such an awful thing? The answer is, of course, you run it in emulation on your website.
http://cowlark.com/2015-02-03-bbc-micro
(Don't expect much. It's in Basic.)
Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
#49When I read things like this, I end up feeling a lot of sympathy for kids who are trying to learn programming and "computers" nowadays. I count myself as very fortunate that I started learning programming back in the 80's when not much was expected out of computers, since they were so (relatively) underpowered. I feel like I was able to learn programming concepts at a much more leisurely pace than you're expected to…
At the same time, the counterpoint is of course that the 80s (and 90s for most) really required you to read a lot of books. There wasn't really any coding boot camps, tutorials (as they are today), pluralsight etc etc and the chances of meeting another accomplished programmer in real life was fairly low.
Some of the books from back then were much higher quality than what you get today. By reading Kernighan/Ritchie and Stroustrup's books and understanding them you could get a pretty deep understanding of C/C++. Most of the material available today seems pretty superficial in comparison. Maybe that's because back then you had a decent shot at understanding the whole stack and now there are just too many choices
Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography
#50I've been a developer for 20+ years (traditional CS/EE degree) and i think it's more difficult to be an excellent developer now than it ever has been. The sheer number of DSLs and the rate at which new ones appear and extant ones become less relevant is frightening.
sure the barriers to entry to become a novice programmer are far lower compared to 20 years ago, but the flip side of the low entry barrier is a seductive paradigm that can so easily mislead an aspiring developer into thinking they have reached some baseline competence, because they followed a line-by-line tutorial to create a rails app to store and display photos in a cool slideshow with swirling transitions set to music. Compare that learning coding by typing at a REPL to grok the utility and time complexity of data structures. The immediate sense of accomplishment is so much higher in the former. To someone with no prior cs training, there seems little to recommend the difficult path.