301–310 of 329 posts
a=10 a=a+1 print a goto 10
i grew up a computer wunderkind, and now have gray hairs in my beard. it's hard to be an old wunderkind, but giving endless shit to the new wunderkinds sort of makes up for it.
Programming can be a very solitary experience, and at exactly the same time very social.
Started on BASIC on the ZX Spectrum+, learnt to program initially from the user's manual, but my skills grew exponentially when I realised that I could hit BREAK just before some of my games had finished loading and drop into their source code. I did not know that other languages existed. I did not even know that there were other people in India who programmed computers. A year later our school introduced a summer cl…
My case:
Got it when in sixth grade. Used to wonder what sin and cos functions were (having not studied trigonometry as yet) :-) Managed to figure coordinate geometry out though to create shapes on the screen.
This was the best gift my father ever gave to me. Around seventh grade, I was imagining 3D animated movies. Tried hard to figure an equation that would describe a human face, so I won't have to compose it from geometrical primitives! :-)
Tenth grade, I was programming in machine code (no assembler, converted mnemonics to machine code by hand!). Imagined a compiler (was not aware of them preexisting) and made a simple prototype that converted post-fix expressions to machine code. My last bit was to finally manage to create a 3D animation, as big as I could fit into the available memory (My biggest loss here was not having any non-volatile storage whatsoever. Used to write down finished programs back into my notebook! Could never build on the top of software I had already written once...
I still have the machine with me in my home country, though haven't touched it in years!
Early on, I didn't realise that you could retype lines to replace them, so was careful to type them out 100% accurately. One time a "friend" came and mashed the keys when I was on line 1300 or so, earning him detention for a week from the headmaster who was also none the wiser!
Sometimes I still think of VB, though it’s been a decade since I wrote any — especially with certain Chinese foods. DIM SUM NICE FOODS, reads the storefront. Yes, I think. But dim sumNiceFoods as what?
I started out in 2001. Back then I was working for some company as a graphics designer -- I had been there for about 1 year (fresh out of school) -- building the layouts for their countless websites. Back then the whole internet industry was about to collapse and I could see the proverbial axe dangling over me come the end of my year contract. A coworker of mine was responsible for the programming. Mostly perl and ph…
I was a business major and just found this great site and started teaching myself programming a year ago. I started with Python...the question that always nags me is that,in what situations (in programming) would this deficiency become a problem?