101–109 of 109 posts
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Yeah sorry, should have made that clear.
Someone tagged the picture of the DJ with the comment "This just in : Mojang might have paid a famous DJ to help people feel more inclined to party. This is disgusting." Apt.
To me, it seems like a superficial comment that misses any of what actually matters about the topic for the sake of a smug joke.
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A musician might. There aren't that many professions were a decent piece of work that makes one person happy can scale up to make a million people happy with minimal marginal effort.
Excellent example. Most famous rock musicians aren't extraordinarily talented at playing their instruments - Richard Wright of Pink Floyd couldn't even read sheet music. Jimmy Page is quite a sloppy guitarist. Pure technical ability is a dime a dozen. Check YouTube for a zillion teenagers who can play shred guitar as well as anyone. But inspired creativity is rare and valuable, and execution requires only a certain l…
> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…
This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?
> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…
I have a feeling Markus is referring to typing in machine code (in a totally opaque way) using DATA statements combined with a small loader written in Basic.[1] Here's an article discussing this approach.[2] This was very common in the computer magazines during the 80s. You learn a lot about patience and attention to detail, if nothing else. There were attempts to mitigate this..[3] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T…
Don't forget that DATA statements just contain comma separated constants, and they were useful for a lot of stuff, not just POKEing a byte into memory. Manipulating these constants gave some people their first taste of 'reverse-engineering' level data. :-)
And the fact that people were typing in machine code, to directly manipulate the hardware, is pretty impressive. It's even more impressive if they went on to learn more about assembler in order to modify the code somehow. Instruction manuals for the machines included information about machine language programming.
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This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?
24. Even though we always had a computer at home, I never got into programming and spent most of my time playing games. (The learning curve was too steep, and besides, what could I possibly make that was better than the games I was playing?) Then when I got to college I majored in CS. Now I'm definitely interested in making games. :) In my opinion, the abundance of dynamic and interpreted languages, powerful tools, p…
PRINT "Hello from the Computer"
It helped that our parents limited us to 30min/day of playing games, but were okay with me spending more computer time programming (or playing my own games, though I rarely did that. Making them better was way more fun than actually playing them).
I don't remember how old I was at the time, but it was definitely I was using Windows 3.11 (it was installed, but you couldn't run any decent apps when all your RAM was used up by win). By the time we got a Win95 computer (which in fairness was probably in '98 or '99) I was pretty decent at BASIC.
I continued to play around with it 'til I started learning C++ in maybe 2003? Luckily prolonged exposure to BASIC doesn't seem to have done any lasting damage :)
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Reminds me of Zed Shaw's Learn Code The Hard Way approach: > You must type each of these exercises in, manually. If you copy and paste, you might as well just not even do them. The point of these exercises is to train your hands, your brain, and your mind in how to read, write, and see code. If you copy-paste, you are cheating yourself out of the effectiveness of the lessons.
I don't know about that, but you do need to at least interact with the code on some level, eg. by cut+pasting, then playing around with the code to make it do different things. Also, I don't know many professional programmers who type everything in by hand. It'll be something copied from a previous project, or cribbed from the documentation / somewhere online, then hacked into shape. Of course, in order to do any of…
> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…
This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?
I was also given an Atari 130XE by an uncle that booted to BASIC, explored GORILLAS.BAS when DOS 5.0 came along, etc.
> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…
This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?
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I don't know about that, but you do need to at least interact with the code on some level, eg. by cut+pasting, then playing around with the code to make it do different things. Also, I don't know many professional programmers who type everything in by hand. It'll be something copied from a previous project, or cribbed from the documentation / somewhere online, then hacked into shape. Of course, in order to do any of…
Professional programmer != person learning to code.
Just because they're learning to code, doesn't mean that you should put artificial hurdles in front of them.