Childhood coding
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I wrote my first game when I was about 14 or 15, on my lovely Amiga 1200. I did not really know what I was doing, but the outcome was quite good (it was a MadTV clone, but with a radio station). I still have my old Amiga, and just for the fun of it, I took a look at my old code (which was written in CanDo... guess nobody knows it). I was pretty amazed of what I did without knowing what I did, but I stumbled upon a... "concept" that I used pretty often. It basically looked like this (pseudo code):
if not rect.PointInRect(point) or control.IsDisabled() then DoNothing() else ... # Some real code here endifDoNothing is not a dummy here, it was an actual function. Yes, I had a function that just did... nothing :D And I used it pretty often. Oh, and the "else" part was not always there. Sometimes I only had the if/DoNothing part (no idea what sense that made to me when I was a kid). So what tells me this? I was able to get a full game up and running, but knew sh*t about boolean algebra and how these strange if-thingies work. It still makes me giggle. -
I wrote my first game when I was about 14 or 15, on my lovely Amiga 1200. I did not really know what I was doing, but the outcome was quite good (it was a MadTV clone, but with a radio station). I still have my old Amiga, and just for the fun of it, I took a look at my old code (which was written in CanDo... guess nobody knows it). I was pretty amazed of what I did without knowing what I did, but I stumbled upon a... "concept" that I used pretty often. It basically looked like this (pseudo code):
if not rect.PointInRect(point) or control.IsDisabled() then DoNothing() else ... # Some real code here endifDoNothing is not a dummy here, it was an actual function. Yes, I had a function that just did... nothing :D And I used it pretty often. Oh, and the "else" part was not always there. Sometimes I only had the if/DoNothing part (no idea what sense that made to me when I was a kid). So what tells me this? I was able to get a full game up and running, but knew sh*t about boolean algebra and how these strange if-thingies work. It still makes me giggle.A 5 for such honesty.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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A 5 for such honesty.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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I wrote my first game when I was about 14 or 15, on my lovely Amiga 1200. I did not really know what I was doing, but the outcome was quite good (it was a MadTV clone, but with a radio station). I still have my old Amiga, and just for the fun of it, I took a look at my old code (which was written in CanDo... guess nobody knows it). I was pretty amazed of what I did without knowing what I did, but I stumbled upon a... "concept" that I used pretty often. It basically looked like this (pseudo code):
if not rect.PointInRect(point) or control.IsDisabled() then DoNothing() else ... # Some real code here endifDoNothing is not a dummy here, it was an actual function. Yes, I had a function that just did... nothing :D And I used it pretty often. Oh, and the "else" part was not always there. Sometimes I only had the if/DoNothing part (no idea what sense that made to me when I was a kid). So what tells me this? I was able to get a full game up and running, but knew sh*t about boolean algebra and how these strange if-thingies work. It still makes me giggle.I didn't do anything that spectacular, but when I was 16 I wrote a tetris clone in turbo pascal for the final project of my 2nd year programming class. Then over the summer I started writing a top scrolling shooter game, I got the engine to what I estimated was 60-80% complete before the accumulated WTFs I was developing made me take what ended up being a permanent break. The biggest of them was that my code was object oriented, but I was fully self taught and had no idea of the concept of polymorphism. Instead my MovingObject class used function pointers to handle different forms of behavior. This kinda sorta worked but was a real pita in implementation and kept failing for reasons I could never figure out.
Otherwise [Microsoft is] toast in the long term no matter how much money they've got. They would be already if the Linux community didn't have it's head so firmly up it's own command line buffer that it looks like taking 15 years to find the desktop. -- Matthew Faithfull
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I wrote my first game when I was about 14 or 15, on my lovely Amiga 1200. I did not really know what I was doing, but the outcome was quite good (it was a MadTV clone, but with a radio station). I still have my old Amiga, and just for the fun of it, I took a look at my old code (which was written in CanDo... guess nobody knows it). I was pretty amazed of what I did without knowing what I did, but I stumbled upon a... "concept" that I used pretty often. It basically looked like this (pseudo code):
if not rect.PointInRect(point) or control.IsDisabled() then DoNothing() else ... # Some real code here endifDoNothing is not a dummy here, it was an actual function. Yes, I had a function that just did... nothing :D And I used it pretty often. Oh, and the "else" part was not always there. Sometimes I only had the if/DoNothing part (no idea what sense that made to me when I was a kid). So what tells me this? I was able to get a full game up and running, but knew sh*t about boolean algebra and how these strange if-thingies work. It still makes me giggle.The worst coding I ever did as a kid was to write programs that used dozens of variables because I hadn't learned about arrays yet.
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The worst coding I ever did as a kid was to write programs that used dozens of variables because I hadn't learned about arrays yet.
Oh I knew about arrays! :D There was one huge array with all the game variables (for save games)... oh yes it was HUGE...
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The worst coding I ever did as a kid was to write programs that used dozens of variables because I hadn't learned about arrays yet.
ClementsDan wrote:
I hadn't learned about arrays yet
I on the other hand... In my first programming course (using BASIC-Plus on a PDP-11) one of the assignments was to do something (I forget what) with a bunch of numbers and it was expected that we would use a bunch of individual variables. But I said to myself, "there's gotta be a better way", and proceeded to read the next chapter of the book, which covered "subscripted variables" (arrays). So I wrote my program using them and turned it in. The teacher replied, "that's next week's assignment!" :laugh:
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I wrote my first game when I was about 14 or 15, on my lovely Amiga 1200. I did not really know what I was doing, but the outcome was quite good (it was a MadTV clone, but with a radio station). I still have my old Amiga, and just for the fun of it, I took a look at my old code (which was written in CanDo... guess nobody knows it). I was pretty amazed of what I did without knowing what I did, but I stumbled upon a... "concept" that I used pretty often. It basically looked like this (pseudo code):
if not rect.PointInRect(point) or control.IsDisabled() then DoNothing() else ... # Some real code here endifDoNothing is not a dummy here, it was an actual function. Yes, I had a function that just did... nothing :D And I used it pretty often. Oh, and the "else" part was not always there. Sometimes I only had the if/DoNothing part (no idea what sense that made to me when I was a kid). So what tells me this? I was able to get a full game up and running, but knew sh*t about boolean algebra and how these strange if-thingies work. It still makes me giggle.I remember CanDo!!!
I'm largely language agnostic
After a while they all bug me :doh:
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I remember CanDo!!!
I'm largely language agnostic
After a while they all bug me :doh:
Cool :D
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I wrote my first game when I was about 14 or 15, on my lovely Amiga 1200. I did not really know what I was doing, but the outcome was quite good (it was a MadTV clone, but with a radio station). I still have my old Amiga, and just for the fun of it, I took a look at my old code (which was written in CanDo... guess nobody knows it). I was pretty amazed of what I did without knowing what I did, but I stumbled upon a... "concept" that I used pretty often. It basically looked like this (pseudo code):
if not rect.PointInRect(point) or control.IsDisabled() then DoNothing() else ... # Some real code here endifDoNothing is not a dummy here, it was an actual function. Yes, I had a function that just did... nothing :D And I used it pretty often. Oh, and the "else" part was not always there. Sometimes I only had the if/DoNothing part (no idea what sense that made to me when I was a kid). So what tells me this? I was able to get a full game up and running, but knew sh*t about boolean algebra and how these strange if-thingies work. It still makes me giggle.Tak wrote:
if not rect.PointInRect(point) or control.IsDisabled() then DoNothing() else ... # Some real code here endif
I think you knew more about programming than you realized. You were obviously thinking about future extensions and nice features you could add within the DoNothing function. I bet if you had to continue to work on the game today you would be happy the handy DoNothing you put there many years ago. And people would be wondering, how could someone be so brilliant when he was only 14 or 15? :-D