The day you realized you were a programmer ...

[stephen hazel]

For me, when I bought that first book for my Timex Sinclair ZX81. Learned Z80 asm. I wish I still had the little chart that listed off all the opcodes. I never did anything useful on that thing other than put it in "fast mode" to fizz up some concentric shrinking rectangles on the screen. I finally started writing useful stuff for that oh so awesome c64. http://shazware.com/me/pcPast.html[^] Those were the daze :)

[John M Drescher]

Thanks for the link. Really good stuff. :-D

John

[RyanEK]

It's when you sleep at night, and dreams start becoming object oriented.

[PIEBALDconsult]

Senior year of high school, fall of 1983, first class in BASIC-Plus on a PDP-11. Soon, the teachers were asking me how to do such-and-such. :cool:

[Judah Gabriel Himango]

For me, when I spent my week of vacation up in the northern Minnesota woods coming up with ideas for a simple collision detection for my little pet 3d game, going as far as to write down pseudocode on notepads.

[Lost User]

The day I had a game I had written (in 6502 assembler on the BBC Micro) published on Ceefax. Now I was a PROFESSIONAL programmer - PooperPig earned me fifty quid (From memory I got 50 and my friend got the other 50 as he submitted it to Ceefax - so it was my first experience of selling my programming skills - and being ripped off by an agent!)

Take a chill pill, Daddy-o .\\axxx (That's an 'M')

[El Corazon]

patrick.stasko wrote:

It happened today for me.

I knew it the day I first touched my friend's computer. But it was reinforced in two additional incidents to remove any doubt. When my friend got his first computer, he wanted to learn to write games,and could not learn from a book but I could. So learned basic from his book, and taught him through instruction. I knew then this was what I wanted to be. But there was always that lingering doubt -- I was still in high school at the time and still bridling at the refusal of my family to allow any persuit of art. Then the school's new computer was spitting out 0's for cumulative GPA, and the "computer teacher" (business accounting until the school ordered computers) said it was a hardware problem and needed a new computer. What I replied from hearing that (I was also an office aid, so I got to hear a lot) is not to be repeated in front of our ladies here. When his back was turned in computer class, I snuck a peek at his code, and rapidly debugged it, found where he misnamed the cummulative GPA variable -- and since basic automatically initialized and used a new variable whenever named, without warning, what he was adding was not going into what he was printing. I gave the line numbers, and the error on a sticky note on his computer and got back on my computer to do my work. :) he didn't get a new computer. That clinched it until college, I was acing computers, but struggling through a few other classes, namely math, because of school politics. I was disappointed and ready to join the army or police or any other job that didn't require a college education. I was brooding in the stacks of the library when I heard a guy complaining to himself about an error, and I heard the typing on a keyboard. He had brought his macintosh to the library. He was writing a program in hypercard. I was intrigued, he was egotistical and glad to show off his skill. I had never seen hypercard, but in the process of him showing me his program and how it worked, I found his error and pointed it out to him. In the same moment I learned the language I also read enough to debug his program. I was a born programmer, and I realized it. So I chose another school in computer programming, out of state and away from half my problems and all my family. :) This is what I have been doing ever since.

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the c

[DontSailBackwards]

When I thought that BASIC was too slow on my Vic 20 to scroll the screen so I wrote a routine in 6502 & called it from a game I wrote in BASIC. Then I wandered away from programming for 20 years, having only just recently returned to discover .NET. I guess the 3-1/2k of RAM in the Super Expander won't cut it nowadays but back then I wrote a game in BASIC that integrated 9 different games & screens into 1... in 6-1/2k of RAM.

www.CADbloke.com The Broadcast Systems Documentation SYSTEM "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" -Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[El Corazon]

no but he did write a lady in red simulation....

[BillWoodruff]

Congratulations, Patrick, on your experience ! I, unfortunately, can only relate the story of the day that I set out on a quest "to the death" to come up with the simplest (smallest amount of code) LISP program that, given an input of two integers representing the number of rows and columns to be created, whipped up an array memory structure. A month later I had it down to four lines or so of doubly-recursive code. Damn I wish I could remember the way I posed the problem to myself, and the solution, now ! And that was the day that I realized that I "had to be" a programmer : unfortunatly, my realization did not include an inner conviction that I "was" a programmer. In the following years, at times, I thought I was a programmer, but then some humbling thing would happen, like getting a job at Adobe. At Adobe I realized I was around "real" programmers and that I was just a PostScript "idiot savant," a kind of "bearded lady side-show act." Now, fast-forwarding to the present, it seems that any time I got close to thinking I was a programmer (because other people said I was, or people paid me money for programming), I always had something happen (like reading articles here by Marc Clifton and Sacha Barber, or books by Jesse Liberty or Jon Skeet) that quickly deflated my little balloon of ego. And now I just want to write a novel, and am quite content to let programming be a state of activity rather than think about whether it an attribute of my being :) But maybe this is what happens when you get older, and I do not wish this upon you ! May you never age ! best, Bill

"The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis

[El Corazon]

leckey wrote:

Yet I've still can't program the damn TV remote....

harmony, expensive but geekily easy.

[Paul Conrad]

The day I realized I was a programmer was way back in 1981 :-\

"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer "Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon

[Paul Conrad]

Assembly programming was fun on those old Commodore machines :)

"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer "Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon

[El Corazon]

and if we dream of electric sheep?

[DontSailBackwards]

Yeah, with 8 MHz it was pretty-much a necessity if you wanted to scroll all them characters on that massive screen. If I recall, I poke'd an array into a space in RAM & called it. That involved a lot of leafing through the inch-thick programmer's manual that you could buy. I think I wore out the binding on it. Only sold the Vic 20 6 months ago, actually. Still worked & was in original box n all.

www.CADbloke.com The Broadcast Systems Documentation SYSTEM "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" -Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[Joost van Schaik]

I remember three distinct events: me being in front of a window in the computer class in high school, too young to be allowed in. I watched the four Hazeltine 300 baud terminals there in awe fascination - REAL computers (did not know the difference then). This must be somewhere in the early 80's, and decided on the spot to become 'a computer man'. And I did go for it. The third event was when I was working as a junior programmer in the early 90's, about a year or so, as was heavily hacking on a complex UNIX script, while I suddenly stopped and thought: "Is this what I wanted?". And after a few seconds came "YESSS!" and I hacked further, till it worked. The third and most vividly remembered event was somewhat later: I had decided to take a hit on object oriented programming again. Had been playing around with Visual C++2.0 for a while and did not get it. Along came Java, and after three evenings of prodding it happened: sitting behind my private PC is a very small room, something 'clicked', and I suddenly saw this whole 'object thing' very cleary appearing in my mind, like a carpet that suddenly rolled out, a valley you can look in after a long climb to the top of the hill, or a faulty machine suddenly starting to run VERY smootly. I could juggle these objects in my mind, and see them working together. After that is was very hard to make non-OO programs again ;-). The love with Java did not last... after I got to see the very first .NET beta. But the love of the 'object thing' never died ;-)

[mojp]

It was when i was at high school in the 80's and didn't want a standard scientific calculator. I wanted one i could program. Found one with BASIC.

[pg az]

patrick.stasko wrote:

I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind

I wish MY mind worked like that. Every now and then I will look on you-tube to see if they have any new stuff on "Born on a Blue Day" Daniel Tammet. He seems personable enough, I always wonder why he doesn't just make a killing as a software professional, with that kind of visualization/memory. If he can learn Icelandic in a week, what about some programming system, hmm. As of today his blog is trying to sell postcards of his Pi-painting, sigh.

pg--az

[mojp]

Actually even before that, In 1983, when other kids were playing marbles after school, i was in the computer room using the schools Apple 2E. I designed my own (very very simple) programming language and wrote an interpreter for it in BASIC.

[BadKarma]

1 sheep 10 sheeps 11 sheeps 100 sheeps 101 sheeps 110 ... ...

Learn from the mistakes of others, you may not live long enough to make them all yourself.