Lots of begging parents later I owned the book, struggled through it and build some small things. The interesting thing is I never programmed that much but was always fascinated by what amazing things existed. I guess I mostly liked reading about technology and using it a bit. I then mostly went through a phase of playing games on the family computer, completely destroying it when I tried to install Suse-Linux from a CD from some magazine (I was still very young and didn't fully understand what an operating system even is but the article made it sound very cool). My next phase of interest was when I discovered the Llama book and O'Reilly books in general. Programmed some Perl, picked up some other languages but never really build anything worth noting. And then the last experimental phase was when I stumbled upon "Smashing the stack for fun and profit" and into the huge field of computer security. Went through a lot of "crack mes" etc. and just had a fun time. After that I started to understand how things worked a little more and went about it in a more structured way that eventually lead to a CS-ish degree. But I still have the fondest memories of the time when I basically knew nothing and was just fiddling around and then pooof sometimes cool stuff happened, sometimes stuff broke :P
So yeah tl;dr...if it wasn't for stumbling onto Basic some day I might have never gotten interested in anything related to computers.
My favorite program for autoexec just had an infinite loop until you hit Ctrl+C.
Somehow I ended up trying QBASIC a couple of years later and programming suddenly became a lot easier and fun. I especially loved that you could easily switch to graphics mode and just start drawing pixels and lines to the screen, it was like the perfect blank canvas to try out different ideas for a curious young mind.
from turtle import *
color('red', 'yellow')
begin_fill()
while True:
forward(200)
left(170)
if abs(pos()) < 1:
break
end_fill()
done() #!/usr/bin/python
from pygame import *
pantalla = display.set_mode((0, 0), FULLSCREEN)
draw.rect(pantalla, 128, (50, 100, 200, 400))
display.flip()
time.delay(2000)
By default Python comes with Tkinter, though, which lets you do this:
from tkinter import * # or Tkinter in Python 2
w = Tk()
button(w, text="Not OK", command=w.destroy).pack()
For graphics, though, you're better off in JS and DHTML. In http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/tweetfract.html I have an HTML canvas which renders a fractal if you click on it, in 140 bytes:
<canvas onclick="c=this.getContext('2d');
function d(x,y,k){c.fillRect(x,y,1,1);
(k/=2)>1&&(d(x,y,k),d(x,y+=k,k),d(x+k,y,k))
}d(0,0,150)">
<b onclick='this.style.color="red"'>DO NOT CLICK ME</b>
LÖVE2D comes with a bunch of simple examples, like https://github.com/love2d-community/LOVE-Example-Browser/blo...:
-- Example: Loading an Image and displaying it
--[[Description:
Load an image using love.graphics.newImage(image_path)
Draw it using love.graphics.draw
]]
function love.load()
image = love.graphics.newImage("assets/love-ball.png")
end
function love.draw()
love.graphics.draw(image, 400, 300)
end
But Proce55ing is the paragon of this stuff. http://sketchpad.cc/, which uses processing.js, starts you off with this:
// Pressing Control-R will render this sketch.
int i = 0;
void setup() { // this is run once.
// set the background color
background(255);
// canvas size (Integers only, please.)
size(300, 300);
// smooth edges
smooth();
// limit the number of frames per second
frameRate(30);
// set the width of the line.
strokeWeight(12);
}
void draw() { // this is run repeatedly.
// set the color
stroke(random(50), random(255), random(255), 100);
// draw the line
line(i, 0, random(0, width), height);
// move over a pixel
if (i < width) {
i++;
} else {
i = 0;
}
}
#!/usr/bin/python
from pygame import *
from random import randrange
pantalla = display.set_mode((0, 0), FULLSCREEN)
ww, hh = pantalla.get_size()
color = Color(64, 64, 192)
for xx in range(0, ww, 5):
h, s, v, a = color.hsva
color.hsva = xx * 270 / ww, s, v, a # cambiar hue
draw.line(pantalla, # surface
color,
(xx, 20), # punto de inicio
(randrange(ww), hh - 20), # punto de terminar
10) # ancho de rayo
display.flip() # para mostrar
Eat me, GW-BASIC.
Now, some kids in college have an impression that coding is less relevant for a CS career.
Good times. The best was when there was a typo or a bug or it just didn’t work. Esp. the machine code that was just pages of hex.
Learning nothing but theory can come back to bite you some times.
After a chuckle, I showed them how to open the case and retrieve the CD.
In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.
(Turing award lecture, 1972)
As our second best DBA did when I worked at BT - he had worked at NPL and Dijkstra was his boss
I remember changes the variables in the gorilla banana toss game that came with qbasic ~ first time seeing changes in programming changing the game and it was magical.
My friend ended up being a great programmer and I'm doing e-commerce front end / project management work. Great times and I'm thankful for the experience
It turns out, I was using N88-BASIC(86), developed by a Japanese team. Reverse-engineered from N88-BASIC to run on 8086 processor, and produced bytecodes compatible with Microsoft's GW-BASIC, which was released around the same time.
> There's nothing like the joy of programming for the very first time, the realization that you can create something that works with code.
That's so true. I'm thankful that I had use of a computer as a toy, essentially, and the joy I found in creative programming carried me far into the present. I'm not in the education field (at the moment) but would love to, as I get older, to do my part in passing down the torch, to inspire younger people to feel the magic. In my current role at a company, as part of the leadership, I also try to find, share, and encourage that joy.
The first time I had an idea of what programming was, was when I saw my brother trying to explain to me that the window had code that ran it. Of course, I ignored him...
We later did Delphi at school, which was maybe a crazy pedagogical decision. The only thing I would say pedagogically useful was that you wrote PUBLIC and PRIVATE for variables, but C or Java has that for functions.
One way in which I would say my fascination differed is this:
> the realization that you can create something that works with code
A lot of programmers mention the ability to write concrete instructions as their first realisation. OP is closer to my experience, but to me the a-ha moment was more surreal: It is strange to me, even today, how a computer can even exist at all. I often refer to that when I think the world is unstructured.
So, things like NAND gates (and fully homomorphic encryption) are almost mystical; more generally, I feel like computers are something of a vindication for mathematics that started in the Renaissance. Things can be mystical and mundane at the same time. There is a joke about this along the lines of a specific type of medical doctor, but I don't think I can post it here...
On the whole, I don't see a problem with doing Delphi (or Free Pascal + Lazarus) in school, especially if students have studied Pascal earlier - it teaches them many of the same concepts they'll later see in the likes of Java and C++, and it gives them powerful tools to create "real" GUI apps. There are better options these days, but it's not the worst one.
I think that Delphi could be a good language to teach in, but in practice it doesn't seem to be. You lose a lot of students along the way that feel it's irrelevant. In classes where you have a really good teacher they would add in "modules" of their own, irrespective of whether the syllabus makes sense or not. Often, however, a class barely gets through the standard workload to start off with.
And Cherry made peripherals/components, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_(keyboards).
I guess such names make for simple logos.
Cherry, yes – good catch!
I'd forgotten about the cool little LCD display until I looked up your link to it.
That night as I tried falling asleep, the numbers and functions were all I could think about, preventing me from sleeping. It scared me, but I knew that excitement would lead to something interesting someday. It did: I can trace my academic work and career directly back to that experience with the Precomputer 1000.
To this day, I try to limit my bedtime reading to fiction, because when I read technical non-fiction, I get too hopped up on knowledge to want to fall asleep.
Except I'd learned Speccy Basic from an Usborne book (Prior to getting access to a real computer) and as a result some parts of my programs failed to work correctly (usually stuff around PEEK and POKE)
It was a while before I worked out that the issue was :-)
I'm now a researcher at an AI lab in Silicon Valley, and I just finished a five-week stint as a section leader for Stanford's CS106A "Code in Place" introductory Python course (https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/05/07/students-instructor...). There's nothing like the joy of programming for the very first time, the realization that you can create something that works with code. Teaching those sections as well as finding my QBASIC book has reminded me of the feelings that I have from when I started learning how to program roughly 22 years ago. This release of GW-BASIC was quite timely for me.