> "No, no programmer would do something this." He was not sarcastic. I wanted to switch back into Molecular and Cellular Biology right then. But then he added, "No one would end up with code like this because they simply would not have had the patience."

My brother and I learned to program in BASIC on an Apple IIe when we were kids. At the time, we were also into making little movies with our family's VHS camcorder. You could draw graphics in BASIC, so we thought it would be radical to write a program that would draw a cool logo animation for our movies.

We got a big sheet of graph paper and hand-drew the intended pixel art for our logo. Then started writing code to draw it one line at a time. We put a delay between each line so that it would do an animated wipe. We knew how to pause by doing a busy loop:

    10 FOR I = 1 to 100
    20 NEXT I

What we didn't know was how to define reusable procedures (GOSUB). So between each of the hundred lines of pixel art, I typed in that loop. And I mean that literally: this was a line editor. No copy and paste. I wrote it out each time.

Now I just lament having the much free time and focus to be able to do that...