This of course never worked out, and eventually I told my uncle who worked in IT what I was trying to do and he explained why it wouldn't work and we actually disassembled my Microsoft Bus mouse to see how it worked.
Despite my disappointment, I'd learned some things about computers and BASIC in the process and frankly I was hooked.
Here I am 30+ years later still looking for novel uses for things.
Why I do programming?
Why I do programming?
Why I do programming?
These are four differemt questions. With four orthogonal answers.
You cannot truly know your deepest self until you can answer all four questions with insights that resonate and mirror your true self.
Good luck on your unique journey.
(Love, absolutely love, the essay/story.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwXt90ZqA
Amazing talk about programming.
Best of luck!
Started at the same age, also learned programming mostly through SecondLife Lua and other game scripting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658995
I often wonder how much moddable/scriptable games have contributed to the developer pool.
You missed so much school, we’re just going to insist you miss the rest.
The TFA claims "Sometimes the hardest part is maintaining focus and not chasing every shiny new thing", and I agree.
I think you have to go beyond programming, since programming is just a tool for a higher order concept. For example design a solution to a problem.
But I haven't find the way, yet.
If you venture out of that region and try to discover and solve problems (and if needed use code/automation/tech), you have a surer chance of generating wealth.
In a logical world yes, but often the majority of jobs want people who have experience with the shiny new thing.
Occasionally someone (usually at work) will ask “why do you know that?” or “how did you learn how to do that?” (where “that” is typically something outside of my direct job responsibilities).
I’ve been programming for so long and have dabbled or seriously worked with so many parts of the computing landscape - mostly out of simple curiosity and love of craft - that I admit to being somewhat annoyed at questions like this. I have trouble connecting with the premise.
But I don’t want to offend, and it’s not my place to judge when it feels like my interlocutor works in my field simply because the money is there. So I came up with a succinct way to answer those questions.
“I like computers.”
The difference is easily discernible. Online, though, I do interpret it more generously.
Suspicious that you might be acting overconfident, a common issue in software. Impressed that you know so much.
I am your cadet, and I have a similar experience. I have also converged to saying "I like computers", and "I read the docs and datasheets".
Researchers in chemistry and biology may enjoy a similar joy, but I assume it is much more difficult to re-run your experiment with slightly different ingredients. One aspect where these fields are leaps ahead of code is "code producing code": chain reactions are common in the real world and in fact, probably key to the whole thing.
I'm overall impressed with the result. There are things I might have approached differently, and there are things I would have gotten done much faster, but the result is more thorough than I might have done it.
I think what's most interesting is that I've never written specs to this level of detail before. I now have this series of project specs that hold every decision and consideration of this project written in plain english that's incredibly easy for any human to understand regardless of their ability develop software.
Whether or not I keep coding this way, I think this tool is incredible for figuring out exactly what to work on and how to approach it
I've been making a lot of stuff vibe coding, where I'm only talking to the agent about what I want to build, features and such. That's really cool but doesn't scratch the programming itch at all.
However you CAN talk to the agent about code. This is a lot slower to make things than talking about features. But if your goal is to make a codebase that's easy to work with and that you fully understand and have ownership of, you can talk to the agent about code instead of about features and then work with the output rather than just accept the output.
The idea that you can build anything.
I did start early at 12 y/o with a C64.
Then trying to get drunk or laid took over and I only dabbled with it here and there. Got married, had kids, did other things and might as well say abandoned it.
For about the past 10 years I've been doing programming nearly every day.
I wish from circa 1993 to 2010 I had been more heavily involved with it than I was.
Because you failed at grammar? ;-) Engineers and programmers prefer passive voice, it’s endemic.
“Why I program”
Would be the active form.
An example of passive voice would be “Why programming is done by me.” And of course no one would write that.
You may prefer “Why I program”, which is indeed more concise and straightforward. But that's a stylistic preference, not a difference between active and passive voice.
For a similar example, consider “Why I do science”. Here there isn't a convenient way to shorten it, but it's still active voice.
In general, for any X, “Why I do X” is active voice, and “Why X is done by me” is passive voice.
account-5•10h ago
I've stitched disperate corporate systems that don't communicate together with autohotkey. I've used powershell to complete jobs in minutes that take other people hours. I've even used MS Access for data analysis.
As a non professional programmer I learn to use what I have access to, which you can likely see from some of the things I've used above, is not much and stuff you probably wouldn't chose.
However in my personal life where I can follow my interests I struggle with choosing which technologies to learn. I want to learn what's going to last, like SQL for example. An example might be when I went with dart and flutter for cross platform app development, despite it constantly being said that Google will abandon. There were just too many we'd frameworks to chose from, flutter seemed like a no brainer, and it's been pretty great.
This is a bit of a ramble so tl;dr, I learn was useful and hopefully long lasting.