Comment by kylecazar
6 days ago
It's not always your first exposure that you later identify as a catalyst.
I'm an American that took a C++ class in Europe when I was 13 (forward thinking school in retrospect). But when asked, I usually say scripting RS bots was what got me into the field, because I had fun and it was more memorable.
But would I have chosen to do that had I no idea what coding was? Maybe not...
Absolutely agreed.
I had a trash-80 in the early 80s and used to copy BASIC from magazines, and then in the mid 90s I bought a book with a CD in it that taught me how to set up perl-based e-commerce store, which I set up for my mom's retail shop. Neither of those got me interested in programming.
The event in my life that got me there was around 2000, when I bought a Cold Fusion 4 book off of a street vendor - literally on Wall Street - and I spent my evenings building an intranet that replaced the Access database that my company shipped and merged across the country every Friday.
That's when I got hooked, and started building my career (and hobby).
Not sure if something like Scratch would have gotten me there (LOGO definitely didn't) - but I imagine the level of comfort I had with computers at a young age kept me in the vicinity that eventually got me there.
I always love hearing from other people who started with computers by typing in basic from magazines.
For me it was a TI 99/4a and typing in code got me completely hooked on programming. Whether it was a game, a 4 bit cpu simulator of some sort (memories are vague) or a word search solver didn’t matter. It all felt magical.
Logo did nothing for me. It never gave me that sense of satisfaction that I got from writing in basic or assembly.
Yeah it was a Texas Instruments calculator for me too.
This really made me think about what got me interested in programming and I have no idea. In HS, I had a Physics teacher who had a TRS-80 (Model 3, I think) and he would let us use it during Lunch for whatever. But I was already interested at that point. We had a "programming" class where we programmed some kind of computer in some unknown language, but again, I was already interested in programming before then: that was just the outlet.
Really have me wondering now.
To your point I think I'll adjust what I was saying a bit. I was definitely interested. I always thought it would be cool to be able to program. There was good media to make it intriguing from afar. But I had nobody in my life to help me understand.
My mom did a great job making sure I always had a computer but she didn't know enough about them to help.
Elementary school put us in front of them and taught us how to type and let us play oregon trail and print shop, but that wasn't it. And my high school has us programming in Pascal. Meh.
When I was in my 20s, in a new city, working to pay my own way I found the determination needed to teach myself. It absolutely helped that the internet was becoming this wealth of information for the self-taught. That was my launch pad. I definitely think everything else helped get me there
I feel like the baseline teaching is trivially necessary, and should simply be assumed in these kinds of assessments. Getting someone to invest themselves emotionally into a subject is both infinitely harder and valuable, and should always be the focal point.
That is, the true “origin” isn’t worth much — the origin of interest is whatever kicked off the feedback loop of joy —> learning —> joy (in my own case, it was learning djikstra’s algorithm)
I very first got into programming by trying to fix a graphic adventure game that somehow was released with a pretty clear syntax error. This was back in the VIC-20 days. Really, for the first while it was about the games ... tweaking them, altering them, and later writing them.
The actual programming was always a means to that gaming end back then and not the end in itself. So in that sense I can completely relate to where you're coming from.
Over a couple years of that, it started to dawn on me that the programming itself had a power and interest all its own worth pursuing.
But I think if it was dropped in front of me as something I ought to do, no matter how dressed up in "fun" it was, it would have set off my non-conformist predispositions a little too much.
but even today, don't you write code to solve a problem? to fix a bug in an application? to achieve something?
feels to me not that different. just that the targets are no longer games but other kinds of applications.
Of course. But still it's not the same.
What's different is that I found the journey can be just as interesting and engaging as the destination. I read papers, books, and even spend time around here... not because the solutions require it, but because I care about the craft and the process itself.
So yes, the resulting solution is the prime mover, but the process of finding the solutions is no longer just a means to the end, it's part of the motivation of being involved in the profession at all.
> not always your first exposure
Great point. How many professional sports players credit their elementary aged PE classes to their success in sport (as opposed to say crediting a high school coach)?
Progressive, unbridled access and exposure is key.
Same. Got into scripting SCAR and hanging out on the Kaitnieks forums. Delphi Pascal or something right?
Indeed! Fond memories of that orange bulldozer... And lots of lamenting that I was a little too late for the storied AutoRune days :)