On 13 February 2014 00:55, Larry Martell <larry.mart...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 7:21 PM, ngangsia akumbo <ngang...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Please i have a silly question to ask. > > > > How long did it take you to learn how to write programs? > > My entire life. > > I started in 1975 when I was 16 - taught myself BASIC and wrote a very > crude downhill skiing game. OK - it's degenerated into one of these threads - I'm going to participate. I received a copy of "The Beginners Computer Handbook: Understanding & programming the micro" (Judy Tatchell and Bill Bennet, edited by Lisa Watts - ISBN 0860206947) for Christmas of 1985 (I think - I would have been 11 years old). As you may be able to tell from that detail, I have it sitting in front of me right now - other books have come and gone, but I've kept that one with me. It appears to have been published elsewhere under a slightly different name with a very different (and much more boring) cover - I can't find any links to my edition. My school had a couple of Apple IIe and IIc machines, so I started by entering the programs in the book. Then I started modifying them. Then I started writing my own programs from scratch. A couple of years later my dad had been asked to teach a programming class and was trying to teach himself Pascal. We had a Mac 512K he was using. He'd been struggling with it for a few months and getting nowhere. One weekend I picked up his Pascal manual + a 68K assembler Mac ROM guide, combined the two and by the end of the weekend had a semi-working graphical paint program. A few years after that I went to university (comp sci); blitzed my computer-related classes; scraped by in my non-computer-related classes; did some programming work along the way; was recommended to a job by a lecturer half-way through my third year of uni; spent the next 4 years working while (slowly) finishing my degree; eventually found my way into an organisation which treated software development as a discipline and a craft, stayed there for 10 years learning how to be more than just a programmer; came out the other end a senior developer/technical lead and effective communicator. And that's how I learned to program. Tim Delaney
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