The day you realized you were a programmer ...
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
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
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I remember programming BASIC in 4th grade. Yet I've still can't program the damn TV remote....
leckey wrote:
Yet I've still can't program the damn TV remote....
harmony, expensive but geekily easy.
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
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
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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
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
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and if we dream of electric sheep?
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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
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
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
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 ;-)
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
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
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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.
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and if we dream of electric sheep?
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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.
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When you are having a conversation with normal people and you start to visualize how what you are discussing can be converted into a software system. When you keep programmers hours and all your friends know what that means When you have to go back over your emails and letters and remove the semi colons before you send them When you find an error in the .NET framework and have the wisdom to know that with .NET it just might not be your code When no one you know ever asks how your day went because they know you will give them an answer and they really don't want to hear it When on the way to work you constantly think about the unused space on the dash and visualize how well a computer would fit there If you ever ever attempted to win an argument with the phrase, "Look, I can prove it. Here is the truth table" If you have ever taken a sleeping pill to get some sleep for a 7 AM meeting and then got a midnight call for an all nighter that now requires a caffeine pill. Personally, I am tired of being a programmer.
Need a C# Consultant? I'm available.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest HemingwayEnnis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
If you have ever taken a sleeping pill to get some sleep for a 7 AM meeting and then got a midnight call for an all nighter that now requires a caffeine pill.
:laugh:
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
I remember my dad bringing home an IBM PS2 machine that he'd "borrowed" from work when I was about 6. I wrote a batch file options menu for my games, so I didn't have to 'cd' to the appropriate directory. When I was 15, my now brother-in-law showed me Turbo Pascal that he was learning at college, I then wrote a pong game before I started college (the same course as him). Through my 4 years of college I was always showing everyone else how to make the boring program we had to write more interesting, generally through boredom of completing it within a few mins. I thought I was a programmer, then I went work for a company using AS400s and RPG3/ILE, I realised how little I knew. I now write internal web applications for a school in .NET, all alone.
You don't have to be mad to live here [UK], but it helps.
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Sounds very familiar. For me this was in the early to mid 80s and I was 11 or 12 working on that 2k RAM vic20. Or maybe this was after I had my parents spring for the $800 8K RAM upgrade that gave me all the memory I would ever need..
John
John M. Drescher wrote:
2k RAM vic20.
You do it a dis-service - there was a huge 3,583 bytes free at power-up! I only ever got the 3k expansion pack though. Best thing I ever did with a Vic 20 - me and a mate made a box of tricks that linked the Vic's parallel port via triacs (and a huge heatsink!) to ontrol some stage lighting (got up to 8kW) via the use of an assembly program that interpreted a "language" of lighting instructions to control eight channels of lights. It gets worse. When I got the C64 I did a new version that allowed up to 256 channels and full dimming control along with some faders that could have any channel (or group of channels) assigned to them for a bit of manual control. Alas, this one only ever reached demonstration stage with 2 or 3 working channels and one fader! But it did work! Rich
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:) I guess for me it'd be when i stopped typing in code for games from BASIC code listings in books and started writing my own, in ink, in notebooks, when i was supposed to be doing homework.
Citizen 20.1.01
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
That was how I realised I'd caught the programming bug as well - wherever I was going, I'd bring a notepad for writing ideas and snippets of code for first C64 Basic, then GFA Basic for the Atari ST (which made C64 Basic look like a cruel joke). Of course, for the first while, what I wrote was complete nonsense :)
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
I new when I was in 8th grade (11 years ago). We were learning quadratic equations and I hated it, so I learned how to program my TI-83 calculator to do it for me. Then the teacher got wise and realised what I was doing, so he started marking me down for not showing my work. I replied by going back and changing the program to show me the line by line work as well. I've been addicted ever since.
"It's like the sixties, but with less hope."
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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.
... 8 sheep 9 sheep A sheep B sheep C sheep D sheep E sheep F sheep ... oh god I'm channeling a kiwi!
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall
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I new when I was in 8th grade (11 years ago). We were learning quadratic equations and I hated it, so I learned how to program my TI-83 calculator to do it for me. Then the teacher got wise and realised what I was doing, so he started marking me down for not showing my work. I replied by going back and changing the program to show me the line by line work as well. I've been addicted ever since.
"It's like the sixties, but with less hope."
Karl Sanford wrote:
he started marking me down for not showing my work.
MY defense to accusations that I was cheating by not showing work was to do one of the problems for the teacher without showing any work while spectated. None of them were ever able to prove I was copying answers out of the back of the book. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
This may not have been the "first" time, but it hit home pretty hard. When Sudoku puzzles first became popular a few years ago, my father thought I would like them and challenges me to do a "difficult" one (something like 4 out of 5 points of difficulty). Withing a few minutes, I had worked out a simple algorithm, complete with annotations in the boxes and margins, and solved the puzzle just like a computer would, systematically working through the grid eliminating options, until the puzzle was solved. It was not fun, but effective. Even as a human, I knew that the "brute force" solution was the way to go. Unfortunately, I was both the programmer AND the computer! BTW, that was the last sudoku I have ever done!