JaccquesM (long timer on Hacker News) posted about his need to code in a passionate article that resonated with me a lot.
My experiences were similar, if not the same.We had some simple computer classes in school which were mostly spent playing Digger and Frogger, but we wrote some basic programs too. There was something visceral about writing something on a screen, and seeing it come live. Basic as a language and DOS Basic as an environment nailed that aspect - and how! You started the pc, typed basic on the prompt and were dropped into an editor that let you type programs that just ran! And BASIC made no presumption of modularity, so you could just use graphics commands in your program because the language had them.
Compare that to any attempt these days to teach programming to kids - all bound up libraries to be imported before the first step taken - and i'm including specific attempts like shoes et al.
When it came time to pick an elective for Pre-University I decided to pick up Computers simply because I didnt want to do Biology, and the other option - electronics - I was neutral about. The instructors were indifferent, and the syllabus was not that great, but I was hooked. I found a friend who also knew basic and we devoured the Peter Norton book on x86 programming. We'd write assembly programs using Peek and Poke in Basic - mainly TSRs for the fun of it. Our other project was writing a 2D graphics editor in Basic. This took us all year because we wrote it on paper using pencils (to erase out and rewrite lines of code that needed to be shifted), and went to another friend's house to use his dad's pc to enter the programs and see it run. There were a lot of GOSUB XXX lines (read sphagetti code), but we pretty much carried the code in our heads and didnt stop talking about it. We finally did manage to get it working, and I believe I still have the batman portrait I drew using it. Have you ever printed anything by calling the DOS interrupt to dump the screen to the printer? That was what our editor's print function did :)
We graduated to Pascal from there because it was in our syllabus, and quickly discovered the joys of Turbo Pascal and all its cool extensions - especially the asm blocks and the graphics libraries. Of course, we wrote fractal programs and marveled at fractint.
From there it was to Turbo C - to revel in the freedom of C. I remember my first C program being pretty mundane - it converted a number into words. The challenge was that it had to print out the number in the Indian way of doing so which is not the simple thousands, millions, billions model. Instead we have the thousands, lakhs, crores model; and I remember agonizing over it to make it work. Mind you I still didn't have a computer, so this was all still paper and pencil and mental debugging.
Here's why I completely agree with Jacques that coding is a drug: I was so happily engrossed in doing it that I didnt get good enough overall scores to get into a CS bachelors. So I picked mechanical instead, and focused on the areas that were computer centric - Finite Element Method, Graphics etc. My interest in graphics had led me to read up the Schaum's book on Computer Graphics and I already knew the vector math for those pieces long before we did vector math. When we started doing engineering drawing using pencil and paper, projection systems were already familiar to me - because I was on my way to build my own 3d Graphics engine using Turbo C++. All thanks Robert Lafore for making OO click for me. No other book since has made it so lucid, at least for me.
That's the other thing - books. Unlike today, there was no easy access to books in India. My best source were the scores of street booksellers who sold old books - and what a treasure trove of books they had. I learnt of Russian expert systems and computer architectures like nothing else, of APL the language in a book written by Iverson, tons of old British computer magazines that introduced me to editors like Brief and Hypercard-clones, and whole lot more - in all a heady whiff of the ocean of opportunity that lay outside the staid old land of E.Balaguruswamy and Yashwant Kanetkar (these are probably still revered in Indian academia). Sadly, those booksellers now exclusively sell pirated Harry Potters and self help best sellers, but thankfully there are Indian editions of good books nowadays.
But I digress. Throughout my undergrad my only access to computers was at college - so most of it was spent trying to get as much lab time as possible. Lots of social engineering went into this endeavor (sucking up to the CS Dept head to allow use of their lab, helping the lab assistant in the Robotics lab to use the only Sun machine, etc), and pretty little code came out, but it was a heady time because anything was possible. I did manage to get the basic 3D graphics engine working (it proudly spun a sphere around, IIRC), and managed to present a paper on (what is now obviously basic) AI at the Computer Society of India Student convention while doing mechanical engineering.
Fast forward to today: I've been an IT professional for 13 years now. I still code as much as possible at work (architecture/design decisions or helping my teams with complex fixes), but I have a healthy github account, and some more side projects at work. Coding makes me happy. I dont want to stop.
Thanks JacquesM for helping me remember why I do this.
My experiences were similar, if not the same.We had some simple computer classes in school which were mostly spent playing Digger and Frogger, but we wrote some basic programs too. There was something visceral about writing something on a screen, and seeing it come live. Basic as a language and DOS Basic as an environment nailed that aspect - and how! You started the pc, typed basic on the prompt and were dropped into an editor that let you type programs that just ran! And BASIC made no presumption of modularity, so you could just use graphics commands in your program because the language had them.
Compare that to any attempt these days to teach programming to kids - all bound up libraries to be imported before the first step taken - and i'm including specific attempts like shoes et al.
When it came time to pick an elective for Pre-University I decided to pick up Computers simply because I didnt want to do Biology, and the other option - electronics - I was neutral about. The instructors were indifferent, and the syllabus was not that great, but I was hooked. I found a friend who also knew basic and we devoured the Peter Norton book on x86 programming. We'd write assembly programs using Peek and Poke in Basic - mainly TSRs for the fun of it. Our other project was writing a 2D graphics editor in Basic. This took us all year because we wrote it on paper using pencils (to erase out and rewrite lines of code that needed to be shifted), and went to another friend's house to use his dad's pc to enter the programs and see it run. There were a lot of GOSUB XXX lines (read sphagetti code), but we pretty much carried the code in our heads and didnt stop talking about it. We finally did manage to get it working, and I believe I still have the batman portrait I drew using it. Have you ever printed anything by calling the DOS interrupt to dump the screen to the printer? That was what our editor's print function did :)
We graduated to Pascal from there because it was in our syllabus, and quickly discovered the joys of Turbo Pascal and all its cool extensions - especially the asm blocks and the graphics libraries. Of course, we wrote fractal programs and marveled at fractint.
From there it was to Turbo C - to revel in the freedom of C. I remember my first C program being pretty mundane - it converted a number into words. The challenge was that it had to print out the number in the Indian way of doing so which is not the simple thousands, millions, billions model. Instead we have the thousands, lakhs, crores model; and I remember agonizing over it to make it work. Mind you I still didn't have a computer, so this was all still paper and pencil and mental debugging.
Here's why I completely agree with Jacques that coding is a drug: I was so happily engrossed in doing it that I didnt get good enough overall scores to get into a CS bachelors. So I picked mechanical instead, and focused on the areas that were computer centric - Finite Element Method, Graphics etc. My interest in graphics had led me to read up the Schaum's book on Computer Graphics and I already knew the vector math for those pieces long before we did vector math. When we started doing engineering drawing using pencil and paper, projection systems were already familiar to me - because I was on my way to build my own 3d Graphics engine using Turbo C++. All thanks Robert Lafore for making OO click for me. No other book since has made it so lucid, at least for me.
That's the other thing - books. Unlike today, there was no easy access to books in India. My best source were the scores of street booksellers who sold old books - and what a treasure trove of books they had. I learnt of Russian expert systems and computer architectures like nothing else, of APL the language in a book written by Iverson, tons of old British computer magazines that introduced me to editors like Brief and Hypercard-clones, and whole lot more - in all a heady whiff of the ocean of opportunity that lay outside the staid old land of E.Balaguruswamy and Yashwant Kanetkar (these are probably still revered in Indian academia). Sadly, those booksellers now exclusively sell pirated Harry Potters and self help best sellers, but thankfully there are Indian editions of good books nowadays.
But I digress. Throughout my undergrad my only access to computers was at college - so most of it was spent trying to get as much lab time as possible. Lots of social engineering went into this endeavor (sucking up to the CS Dept head to allow use of their lab, helping the lab assistant in the Robotics lab to use the only Sun machine, etc), and pretty little code came out, but it was a heady time because anything was possible. I did manage to get the basic 3D graphics engine working (it proudly spun a sphere around, IIRC), and managed to present a paper on (what is now obviously basic) AI at the Computer Society of India Student convention while doing mechanical engineering.
Fast forward to today: I've been an IT professional for 13 years now. I still code as much as possible at work (architecture/design decisions or helping my teams with complex fixes), but I have a healthy github account, and some more side projects at work. Coding makes me happy. I dont want to stop.
Thanks JacquesM for helping me remember why I do this.
1 comment:
Wow, that was really nice to read, thank you very much for reciprocating and opening the history book on this.
I hope that other people will step forward and will do what you did. I'm going to add a link to the article to point to your page, and any other pages with similar stories.
thanks agin!
Jacques
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