
The need to code - vijaydev
http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+need+to+code
======
cubicle67
_And then, one day it clicked. I don't know what exactly caused it but it was
as if the light had been turned on, I suddenly understood the program that I'd
just typed in_ and* all the ones that I'd been typing in before it. And the
next program I typed in was one that I came up with, not one from the
exercises*

That's _exactly_ what happened to me, and you're the first person I've ever
seen express it.

I was about 10/11 at the time with a Vic20. I spent quite some time with
nothing really making sense. No specific memories, just that I didn't really
get it and was close to getting bored with the whole thing. My next memory is
that suddenly, I _got_ it. One minute I understood nothing, then it all made
sense. Some window opened in my mind and understanding flooded through, an
experience I can't explain and have never had since.

Here's how my story differs though - Once I was midway through high school I
became embarrassed by my affinity with computers. Bit of a social stigma I
spent the next 15 years trying to avoid, working all sorts of different jobs
trying to fit in somewhere. It wasn't until I ticked over 30 that I was able
to admit it (writing code) was the one thing I kept coming back to; the drug
I'd been addicted to for the last almost 20 years, but tried to hide from.

And now here I am, almost 40 and I've just got myself a cofounder, we've
registered a company and I've spent what's been (so my wife says) a lovely
Sunday sweating in the hottest room of the house (the study) working on the
beginnings of a new life. And I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing.
Sad, isn't it :)

~~~
mgkimsal
Not sad at all (that you're working right now). Sad perhaps that you tried to
avoid computers for so long.

I wonder what people like us would have done in BC times ("Before Computers").
I doubt pure algorithmic math work or sciencey research really would have cut
the mustard for me.

~~~
cubicle67
for me, programming is a creative tool. In pre-BC times I guess I'd have
pursued art, sculpture or some other creative endeavour.

~~~
xiaoma
... or been a slave and been beaten for absent-mindedness ;)

------
mattdeboard
A lovely article. I did not start programming with intensity until I was 30,
almost two years ago. Now I look back to my youth, when I was poking around in
Basic, trying to figure out how to write a login system for my computer
(running DOS 5 or something similar), and I wonder, what happened? Why did I
ever stop? Why didn't I carry it through? I spent my teenage years and my 20s
doing work I wasn't passionate about simply because it was easy.

Now programming has changed the way my brain works. I'm a much more critical
thinker. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is crack open Emacs
(yep.) and start hacking. I _need_ to program. Creating software is the first
thing I've ever been truly passionate about in my entire life. My entire
wasted life. At least I found it. Better late than never.

~~~
phugoid
I followed a very similar pattern. I got stuck at DOS 5 and BASIC. At the
time, I had a C book but my 286 couldn't run the compiler. Also, I couldn't
run Windows 3.1. So I stopped learning and picked up the electric guitar.

Like you, I've come back to it full force in my 30s. Programming has invaded
my brain, and shapes the way I think. I have rekindled the excitement I felt
as a child and I won't let go of it again.

~~~
patrickk
Weird. I have a memory of when I was about 12, attempting to code BASIC on a
VTech PreComputer Prestige (not a 'real' computer!):

[http://ttggallery.blogspot.com/2010/01/vtech-pre-computer-
pr...](http://ttggallery.blogspot.com/2010/01/vtech-pre-computer-
prestige.html)

The manual had some instructions for learning BASIC. I messed around with it
for a few days, but never stuck with it long enough with it to have an
epiphany. It was only when I got to college in my late teens that my eyes were
opened to the possibilities of programming. Wish I taught myself to code
instead of wasting time moping around during my school years!

~~~
remicles2
I learned how to program BASIC on Vtech too. It was "Precomputer Power Pad
Plus", and it had a similar blue top spiral bound manual. I wish I still had
the print copy, but I found an electronic one here:
[http://www.vtechkids.com/_f/_pw/_manual/Precomputer_PowerPad...](http://www.vtechkids.com/_f/_pw/_manual/Precomputer_PowerPad_Plus.pdf)
.

------
senko
A great story.

 _That process, the act of programming is something that I need to do._

My feelings exactly. I can't not program. If I'm burned out with some complex
work-related problem during the day, I can still catch myself fiddling around
some random unrelated little code that does something "cool" (whatever might
be cool for me at that moment) in the evening.

I started programming in elementary school (10yo), when I got a C64 computer,
which was very popular at the time. BUT, I got it with a disk drive (1541-II
drive, which cost more, and had more CPU power than the actual computer), and
all my friends had tape drives, so I couldn't exchange games with them..

So I read and re-read the owner's manual, which was in German, and I didn't
really know German .. so I would type these BASIC examples and try to figure
out what happens. I think one of the first programs I wrote and understood was
a variation of "guess the number" game.

~~~
tomjen3
My first programming experience was with a guess the number program that I
partly got from a magazine which came with a free copy of Delphi 3.

I didn't understand enough to do anything but use integers though, so all the
cheat codes I put into it was numerical.

Thanks for the memories.

~~~
l0nwlf
Not counting 7 years of GWBASIC on MSDOS, my first experience was with LOGO in
class II. REPEAT 360 [FD 1 RT 1] for making a circle, nostalgic. :)

EDIT: Downloaded BASIC from
[http://www.weihenstephan.org/~michaste/pagetable/recompiler/...](http://www.weihenstephan.org/~michaste/pagetable/recompiler/apple1basic_osx.zip)
and now writing some silly codes.

------
xiaoma
Wow. I can almost picture that kid!

I've only done limited amounts of programming, but I can certainly see how it
could be addictive as you get better. A lot of the time I've spent has been
utterly wasted, e.g. fighting for a week to get a rails install configured 2
years ago and then mostly giving up as various tutorials I was following were
all out of date. But when I've gotten something working such as the kongregate
shootorial, it's been easy to spend all my free time for a week tweaking it
and improving it.

I also have to say that the entry point for programming (aside from setting up
the environment) has been a lot less frustrating than for some of my other
pursuits such as language learning. I must have learned a good 200 words of
Swedish before my pronunciation was good enough that natives could even guess
at what I was saying. Obviously at a higher level, language learning is more
about memory than intense thought like programming is, but a lot of people get
frustrated long before reaching that point. Programming is also a hobby that
won't lead to being a perpetually broke translator.

------
mebassett
>> Programming has an addictive component that is very strong. As you get
better you gain more expressive power, you can do more complicated things than
you could do before, solve more complex problems.

and

> > It's like a drug. I'm still fascinated by it, even almost 30 years to the
> day later I still read about languages, new ways to solve old problems, all
> kinds of developments in software and hardware as though it is the first
> time that I hear about these things.

It is like a drug. I think our brains fire off the same pleasure inducing
endorphins when we figure something out or learn something new. And it happens
so much in programming: you implement something old in a new way and you get a
little buzz, you squash a bug that's been getting to you for a period of time
and you get a bigger buzz. I think curiosity when we were little got us
interested, but ever since we, or at least I, have been a junky. I sometimes
wonder how my life would be different if, by chance, I would have gotten
addicted to something else. There's so many things to get addicted to these
days.

my other drug of choice is mathematics. the highs are higher, but they take a
lot longer to reach. programming gives you rewards almost instantly.

------
rbarooah
I've never understood why Byte magazine was shut down. There's been nothing
like it. I can't imagine it not being popular in today's tech culture. I'd pay
$100 or more for a year's subscription to it right now.

~~~
kragen
Because of the web. Writers no longer need printing presses to reach
interested readers. Readers no longer need managing editors to select good
writers and articles. (Writers can still benefit a lot from good editing.
Witness the long list of thank-yous on every Paul Graham article.)

~~~
rbarooah
Would that this were true. There just isn't anything on the web that compares.
(or if there is, please please tell me!)

After writing my comment I did some research and found this:
<http://www.halfhill.com/bytefaq.html>

It turns out that BYTE was shut down because it didn't focus on WinTel enough
- which was the dominant platform at the time (late 90's). I had always
suspected this.

It wasn't some overt conspiracy though. Byte had above average circulation for
a computer magazine, and far higher resubscription rates. The problem was that
because it didn't cater to a specific well defined segment of buyers, it was
less appealing to advertisers.

Given that so much of the web is advertising driven, I don't see how it's
immune from this. There can be a huge number of people who want a source of
well written _broad ranging_ tech material but it's the advertisers who fund
the web and they don't want broad ranging. They want people neatly divided up
into predictable segments of buyers.

What gets funded on the web isn't determined by what users want - it's what
advertisers will pay for.

~~~
kragen
> There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please
> please tell me!)

The breadth and depth of well-written technical information available on the
web is far, far beyond what was available in Byte in its heyday. Consider:

<http://lwn.net/Articles/428530/bigpage>
<http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/category/programming>
<http://hackermonthly.com/issue-10.html>
<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/> <http://prog21.dadgum.com/>
<http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/> <http://diveintomark.org/> <http://lambda-
the-ultimate.org/> <http://www.facebook.com/Engineering>
<http://research.google.com/video.html> <http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/>
<http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/> <http://www.exampler.com/blog/>

The big difficulty these days is not getting access to well-written, broad-
ranging tech material; it's choosing which well-written, broad-ranging tech
material you want to read out of all the immense quantity of material out
there, and avoiding spending all of your time reading it. Services like HN,
Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, and Slashdot basically exist to solve this
filtering problem (although not, obviously, limited to the tech press).

> What gets funded on the web isn't determined by what users want - it's what
> advertisers will pay for.

That's true, but fortunately it's irrelevant, because what gets written about
on the web isn't determined by what gets funded—it's what people want to write
about.

~~~
rbarooah
I respectfully disagree with you. There is obviously a far higher quantity of
technical 'information' on the web, but almost none of it reaches the
standards of the professional writing that was done by Byte.

The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist,
or self-serving. Some of them are informative but most of them lack
perspective, and many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which
are themselves advertising driven. There are notable exceptions, HN obviously,
and LTU for example. But most of what gets posted on HN is junk. Hacker
Monthly is a gorgeously executed but frankly it reads like an 80's fanzine,
and LTU is great but super-narrow.

What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine article
takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention
interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add
breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize
it to produce something with added value.

That kind of activity only happens when there are professionals who are
skilled and able to do it. Just wanting to write about stuff isn't enough.

We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-
entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts, but
we've lost perspective and sadly social news sites don't magically bring it
back. They can only filter what actually gets produced.

I would link you to some of the articles I am referring to, but whoever owns
byte.com now has taken the archive off-line.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing the web - it's added a lot. But it's also
taken stuff away that it hasn't replaced so far, and the everything is free
but ad-supported model has a lot to do with that.

~~~
kragen
> The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow,
> sensationalist, or self-serving.

I'm shocked that you would say that about LWN, or Ian Lance Taylor's blog, or
Landon Dyer's blog, or James Hamilton's blog, or Google Research Videos. It's
so far from reality that I feel compelled to ask if you've actually read them.

> many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves
> advertising driven.

Or that. I mean, maybe Mark? Or Gruber? But can you seriously see James
Hamilton or James Hague or Raymond Chen or LWN writing an article "to gain
votes on these sites"? I mean, come _on_.

> But most of what gets posted on HN is junk.

True. But Byte published less than one article per day, and only a minority of
its articles were of the high quality that we're talking about here.

> What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine
> article takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention
> interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add
> breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize
> it to produce something with added value.

Well, I haven't written for Byte, but my limited experience writing magazine
articles falls pretty far short of what you're describing there. Byte _did_
have some pretty good stuff, it's true. But as often as not, professional
writers synthesize those perspectives with errors and FUD.

And I'd like to point out that in
[http://web.archive.org/web/20050101022330/http://www.byte.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050101022330/http://www.byte.com/)
there were three articles written by Ernest Lilley in, I believe, the same
month. So I think "weeks" may be an overestimate of how much time was normally
spent on an article. Maybe in 1998 or something they had a much larger staff?

Looking at November 1997:
[http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19980204071948/http://www.b...](http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19980204071948/http://www.byte.com/art/9711/9711.htm)

This was close to Byte's peak of the 1980s. Yet what do we find? A
20-paragraph article cluelessly claiming that autoconf "neatly eliminates this
work [of porting software between Unix variants]" and that most "public-domain
software packages" use autoconf; an in-depth article about classes of ATM
service by a guy who writes books about ATM and TCP/IP that somehow neglects
to mention how people in the TCP/IP world solve the same problems, and fails
to note the degree to which ATM and TCP/IP were increasingly in competition,
to the point that ATM is today a minor niche physical-layer protocol; an
editorial in favor of standardizing Java; reviews of 26 new MMX laptop models;
a one-paragraph article about delays in the shipment of Tillamook; a
competitive review article of cryptography software that pits PGP against
Netscape and Microsoft Outlook; a competitive review article of web server
software that reviews Microsoft IIS and Netscape SuiteSpot, but somehow failed
to include Apache (despite noting that it was the market leader); an
evaluation of the new Number Nine graphics card; and so on.

The vast majority of this stuff is of essentially no lasting value. And, while
competitively testing 26 models of laptop against each other may be expensive
(well, I'm guessing that the vendors footed the hardware bill), it's not
really in the same ballpark as [http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-
engineering/hybrid-in...](http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-
engineering/hybrid-incremental-mysql-backups/10150098033318920) or
<http://lwn.net/Articles/429086/> or <http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/464>
or <http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html> or
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/03/02/10135...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/03/02/10135747.aspx)
— the closest current equivalent would probably be stuff like
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/4207/asus-g73sw-third-times-
th...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4207/asus-g73sw-third-times-the-charm).

> We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-
> entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts,
> but we've lost perspective…

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "lost perspective"?

~~~
rbarooah
> I'm shocked that you would say that about LWN, or Ian Lance Taylor's blog,
> or Landon Dyer's blog, or James Hamilton's blog, or Google Research Videos.
> It's so far from reality that I feel compelled to ask if you've actually
> read them.

I have read them.

I think that even the byte examples you linked are better than 99% of the
articles that appear even on HN and certainly what passes for tech journalism.
They don't stir the heart but they are informative and concise - reading them
even now doesn't feel like I've wasted my time. I disagree about the lasting
value - they are concise and provide a very quick way to get an understanding
of what was going on in the industry at the time. Mocking them for using
terminology which now seems dated is out of place.

There simply isn't a place now where I can even pay to get this kind of
concise but technical view of what's going on.

The LWN stuff is narrow and much less concise, and although the blogs you
mention do have very good stuff, they are also narrow and also have some
intensely time wasting hobby horses.

 _BUT_

I will concede: most of the individual pieces you list in your penultimate
paragraph are indeed excellent. Even though even some of them are surrounded
by time wasting random personal fluff, and a couple of them take 10 paragraphs
to beautifully make a single emotive point. Which frankly, I can do without
most of the time.

It's quite possible that there wasn't even one article per issue on average
that compares favorably to the very best blog pieces.

But none of that changes the fact that there is no source for this kind of
concise and consistent material anymore.

I want a magazine (electronic is fine) that gives good _technical_ coverage of
the industry with concise articles that don't waste my time, where every piece
is of reasonable quality and some special pieces are really great. Monthly
would be fine.

What I have is tens of sites that give narrow coverage, and are mostly full of
dross. In order to find the good material (none of which is the concise cross-
industry coverage mind you), I have to visit all of them every day and sift
through hundreds of pieces of rubbish looking for the odd gem. Oh - and guess
what? I have to read a lot more rubbish to even know whether it was good or
not.

As I said originally, the web has brought us stuff we didn't have before -
volume, and I'll concede some higher quality stuff than we ever had before.

But we've also obviously lost something. I honestly don't know why you're so
trying so hard to claim otherwise.

~~~
kragen
> Mocking them for using terminology which now seems dated is out of place.

I wasn't mocking the autoconf article for using dated terminology. I was
criticizing it for containing serious factual errors in its main points. I
didn't even mention the terminology of the encryption-software article and the
laptop-review article I was mocking.

> I think that even the Byte examples you linked are better than 99% of the
> articles that appear even on HN and certainly what passes for tech
> journalism.

Better than 99% of what appears on HN is no great feat, but earlier in the
thread you seemed to be saying that Byte "add[ed] breadth and perspective
gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize[d] it", and by contrast,
what is available today was "typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-
serving. …[sometimes] informative but most of them lack perspective," but the
Byte articles I mentioned were for the most part extremely narrow, often
written by a single domain expert and completely lacking in any larger
perspective. Many of them were also indirectly self-serving — they read like
sales brochures for certain Byte advertisers.

> Even though even some of them are surrounded by time wasting random personal
> fluff, and a couple of them take 10 paragraphs to beautifully make a single
> emotive point.

Which ones are you talking about? I went back and followed the links and read
the articles in depth (which I hadn't done the first time) and I'm completely
mystified by your assertion. It's as if you're writing your comments from a
parallel dimension with a completely different set of articles. Those
articles, by the way, aren't cherry-picked from among the best; I just went to
the home page of several of the sources I'd mentioned earlier and picked the
first article that looked like something good.

It _is_ true that the articles in Byte were very short, and the average
quality was okay.

> But we've also obviously lost something. I honestly don't know why you're so
> trying so hard to claim otherwise.

I was going to agree with you, because my memory of Byte was of some extremely
high-quality and pioneering articles. But then I dug the old Byte issues out
of the Wayback Machine, and it turned out that the problems you were
complaining about were worse in late-1990s Byte than in the current web — at
least the parts of it that I read. I'd forgotten all about the endless piles
of reviews of insignificant graphics cards from now-defunct manufacturers.

> In order to find the good material (none of which is the concise cross-
> industry coverage mind you),

Can you point me at an example or two of what you're talking about from the
Byte archives? I'm not sure what you mean by "cross-industry coverage". Maybe
if you give me an example I can tell you where to find similar stuff on the
current web.

> I want a magazine (electronic is fine) that gives good _technical_ coverage
> of the industry with concise articles that don't waste my time, where every
> piece is of reasonable quality and some special pieces are really great.
> Monthly would be fine.

I'd like that too. It seems like to the extent that the articles already
exist, you could put it together simply as an RSS feed of links. Maybe you
could do it as a Delicious tag.

~~~
rbarooah
Who could put it together simple as an RSS feed or delicious tag?

Are you suggesting I make it for myself? Which would defeat the purpose. Or
are you suggesting that I hire someone else to make it?

~~~
kragen
I don't think I understand you.

What do you think about the other questions I asked?

------
jgrahamc
When I was first programming I didn't have a computer and so I'd write
programs in little notebooks. When I finally did get a computer it had a very
slow tape recorder for saving programs. I would frequently write programs and
simply switch the computer off without saving. Saving was a hassle and I knew
that the programs worked once I'd executed them.

------
ekidd
This captures more of the story of my life than I'd care to admit. I'm lucky
to earn good money doing something that I can't stop doing.

Once, I was deeply burnt out. I took up knitting in an effort to get away from
programming for a while. And just like Feynman in yesterday's front-page
story, I was once again writing toy programs within a month.

Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if I was born 20 years earlier.

------
BahUnfair
> Programming is not like playing a musical instrument, it is not something
> that you have to have a genetic disposition for.

As someone who is stumbling through the basics of programming and learning
guitar, I can tell you that the secret to success in both is practice and
putting in the time. There are very few activities that you cannot become good
at with sufficient time and resources.

~~~
nopassrecover
The thing is, there has to be some genetic/early developmental disposition. I
"got" programming the first time I tried. 5 years on I'm still fumbling my way
through beginner guitar.

~~~
petercooper
I don't know if there is or if there is not any disposition or genetic element
but if it applies to one, it applies to the other. There are people who, even
with effort, fail to "get" programming (or, more specifically, the logical
concepts behind it) in the same way that you're struggling with the physical
aspects of the guitar.

I've had to do quite a lot of DIY as a home owner but I still feel as useless
and incompetent as I did years ago. The difference between DIY, though, and
programming is that the average joe doesn't _have_ to program whereas I still
have to do house repairs.. :-)

~~~
nopassrecover
Yeah that's the point I'm trying to make I think - I get programming when
others don't (even without practice, the practice just made me a lot better).
And as much practice as I give it I don't get much further with guitar.

------
edw519
_...if you add up the number of hours that I've spent in conversation with
editors, compilers and debuggers over the years..._

I'm afraid to do that. I would probably be shocked by the number, and then
would quickly calculate my lifetime rate, which would probably be about 28
cents per hour. This is the thing non-programmers never understand;
programming takes _a lot of time_.

 _It's like a drug._

Great analogy! For me, there's no bigger high than the exact moment of the
conclusion of this process:

NothingThere + IDidSomething = SomethingThereForTheFirstTimeEver!

 _That process, the act of programming is something that I need to do._

Sometimes I think this is the difficult-to-define missing requirement for
software success. Some call it "passion". Some call it "determination". I call
it "I can't imagine doing anything else".

 _but it has all the components of a 'real' program, input, computation,
output._

Don't forget storage. That was the killer feature that got me hooked. You
could write a simple program, store the result (on a disk!), come back later
and build upon that result. Before disk storage, computers were toys. After
disk storage, they changed the world.

 _there is nothing that can't be learned._

I've never had a tatoo, but if I did, this probably would be it (backward, on
my forehead).

 _...all you need to be is a little bit better than you were yesterday and to
keep doing that for a long time._

This advice:

1\. is excellent. Maybe the best you'll ever read here.

2\. is _not_ intuitive. Most people don't get it. Like compound interest, it's
hard to wrap a human brain around it.

3\. is universal. It applies to almost anything you can do.

4\. is very difficult to teach. As soon as you think people get it, they
don't. They stop measuring their own deltas and resume comparing to
perfection. Grrrrr.

5\. the single most important thing I've ever programmed in business turn-
arounds. The best dashboards and report writers I've ever written are time-
phased; they clearly show improvement _over time_ , which is almost always
more important than any snapshot:

Losing + Improvement + Time = Winning

 _Beware of that bug though, once it bites you, you'll be hooked for life._

To this day, whenever I need something for myself and can't find it in 5
minutes, I build it. It may not be the most effective way, but I just can't
help myself. There must be a (3)(2)(2) program for people like me.

------
SamReidHughes
> And so I did. That first copy of byte magazine got read to pieces, I even
> knew the words of the ads by heart.

:-3

I grew up in a later era and one time in the late 80's my mom brought a
portable computer home. When you turned it on the screen would shimmer and my
mom let me type in the word processor. It was disappointing, since I expected
computers to be so much more Amazing than a word processor. Then, later, we
got a home computer, and we had it for seven years, and internet access for
two, without the idea clicking that yes, I could probably write programs on it
somehow. (I couldn't, actually, because QBASIC was not installed.) Finally I
got my start writing "programs" when in eighth grade they taught us how to do
word processing and make spreadsheets, and using MS Works Spreadsheet '99 (on
a new PC) I made a spreadsheet for managing a basketball pool. I was still
unaware of the idea of having a programming environment on a computer. A year
later, though, we had to get TI-83 calculators for math class, and that's how
the hobby of programming kicked in for a lot of people of my generation.
Programming on calculators sure as hell beat devising ways to sort a deck of
cards.

------
wazoox
This is so similar to what I've done .... My first computer was a Casio PB100,
with the 1548 bytes memory extension :) I still have the programs I've done on
small cardboard sheets.

Then I had an MSX in 1986. I made dungeons games, drawing programs... all in
BASIC of course. When I got bored with BASIC I plunged into Rodney Zack's
"programming Z80" and wrote a crude assembler in BASIC.

From there I had a grandiose plan of a 3D 3rd person adventure game in an open
world... I began some work on it and realised I'd need about 10000 times the
64KB RAM to get anything done, and a CPU 100 times as fast, and countless
other stuff :) Happy days, everything was possible back then.

------
KevBurnsJr
Drug Wars on the TI-83 is largely responsible for my interest in computers.

~~~
michaelty
Loved that game!

------
sunjain
What is probably most significant point of this article is that he has enjoyed
programming for that long and still enjoys it, and gets to do it. It is
refreshing to read that, amongst all the craze for startups, somewhere folks
are interested in programming as a hobby, as an art. And not just high school
or college but life-long. I certainly think that just like music, art, sports
there is an aspect to programming which is as fulfilling as these art form.
And more than the end goal, the act itself is also filled with purpose and
fun.

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HiroshiSan
The end really hit me deep...very assuring " It may take a while (it took me
more than a year to learn 'BASIC', which is a very simple language) and I gave
up several times only to go back to it once more." I don't know how many times
I've tried learning python only to fail..but I'm going to keep trying until I
can stick with it and get better...bit by bit.

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rbarooah
I had one of those sharp pocket computers - though I was a but younger at the
time. It was 4 bit!

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dtby
My need to code comes almost exclusively fromy my need to understand. If I can
understand a problem space well enough to explain it to a computer, I probably
understand it.

~~~
ruslan
This is only one side of the virus. There's another one: the need to create
things. I feel a great need to implement my _own_ ideas both in software and
in hardware, i.e. first to understand the problem domain, then to create
something that relys on this new knowledge and that does not yet exist. And
it's a great great pleasure to observe the thing I created works. Maybe not as
I initially imagined, but works! And I feel so miserable when it does not,
usuaully because of some nasty bug (or a bad concept) and I cannot help stop
debugging and debugging till I get it working! :-)

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mcnemesis
I actually once asked the StackOverflow community where the software we make
isn't so dear to us as "one's own child" - at least I feel that way so often.

I(){ _just_love_code;} I();

