Gavri Fernandez ([info]ga_woo) wrote,
2006-07-25 23:40:00
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Why I will never be a Great Programmer

Ask a Great Programmer how they got into programming and you'll hear something like this:
I used to tinker with this Commodore SX-64 Portable in school. No, I think it really began with the HP calculator I used to program with their RPN stack language when I was 12 years old. And then it was fun making the MITS Altair 8800 do weird stuff. Basically, I realised at a very young age that I was surrounded by programmable digital machines.

Nobody ever says: I worked in Turbo C on Windows. That's what we had in our college labs.

Damn.

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  • 59 comments

[info]saiprasad

July 25 2006, 19:25:28 UTC 5 years ago

Legit LOL. The nudge has been worth it! :)

[info]ga_woo

July 26 2006, 12:12:42 UTC 5 years ago

Thanks for the nudge.

Nobody else bothered to nudge me :(
:P

[info]vijucat

5 years ago

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[info]ga_woo

5 years ago

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[info]pinak

July 25 2006, 20:56:07 UTC 5 years ago

Borland C :|

[info]ga_woo

July 26 2006, 12:11:22 UTC 5 years ago

Borland C was costiler than Turbo. I'm sure my college and school never paid for the bloody things though. So it doesn't matter.

[info]anantj

5 years ago

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[info]ga_woo

5 years ago

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[info]groovitude

July 25 2006, 23:59:05 UTC 5 years ago

I'm far from a great programmer, but I did start on Commodore 64. My first program, which I did with my best friend, was a RPG airport simulation, kind of a Zork on a tarmac. We used Basic to code it. Nostalgia is awesome.

[info]ga_woo

July 26 2006, 12:09:20 UTC 5 years ago

Discovered yesterday that the Commodore 64 is the best selling computer ever. We in middle-class India moved from the Abacus to the Pentium.

[info]bluesmoon

5 years ago

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[info]ga_woo

5 years ago

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Anonymous

July 26 2006, 06:30:41 UTC 5 years ago

This seriously needs to be [info]d

[info]ga_woo

July 26 2006, 06:49:01 UTC 5 years ago

Why anonymous?

Anonymous

5 years ago

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[info]fugney

July 26 2006, 07:30:53 UTC 5 years ago

*tch tch* you're back.

[info]ga_woo

July 26 2006, 12:07:54 UTC 5 years ago

Why tch tch?

[info]fugney

5 years ago

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[info]crabbycool

July 26 2006, 08:25:21 UTC 5 years ago

thank god! i was wondering if you were just busy or had a momentary writers' block!

[info]ga_woo

July 26 2006, 12:07:26 UTC 5 years ago

I so love it when you keep implying that I 'write' :D

[info]rohandsa

July 26 2006, 08:27:21 UTC 5 years ago

It's always sounds cool to have worked with machines have random X's and a series of numbers behind them. Though I have to admit too, the days of digital novelty are passe.

Wonder if generations later, people will start talking about the pretty pentium...

[info]ga_woo

July 26 2006, 12:06:04 UTC 5 years ago

I won't be talking about it, I know. The difference is that they were programming the machine. When I first started programming, I didn't feel like I was programming a Pentium. I was a in DOS emulation on Windows.

[info]rohandsa

5 years ago

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[info]ga_woo

5 years ago

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[info]rohandsa

5 years ago

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[info]ga_woo

5 years ago

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[info]ga_woo

5 years ago

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[info]subtle_blues

July 26 2006, 11:40:49 UTC 5 years ago

err.. we were taught LOGO n BASIC in school? Me no programmer but isn't that how it all began?? :D

[info]subtle_blues

July 26 2006, 11:41:34 UTC 5 years ago

s/school?/school./

[info]ga_woo

5 years ago

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[info]suddenlynita

July 26 2006, 13:12:33 UTC 5 years ago

:))

[info]vaguelyalive

July 26 2006, 14:53:20 UTC 5 years ago

I kinda understood the last sentence. ::is proud::

[info]ga_woo

July 27 2006, 06:27:53 UTC 5 years ago

In case you can't remember or understand sometime later

http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict1&Query=damn&Strategy=*&Database=*&submit=Submit+query

[info]mansu

July 26 2006, 16:06:05 UTC 5 years ago

Also, the meaning of great is relative :).

[info]ga_woo

July 27 2006, 06:28:50 UTC 5 years ago

Yeah. That's actually why I was able to make this post without feeling too bad :D

[info]teemus

July 26 2006, 21:02:17 UTC 5 years ago

Count me in.

[info]ga_woo

July 27 2006, 06:30:22 UTC 5 years ago

Surely there are more like us. They're just hiding.

[info]ma7ur

July 27 2006, 20:22:04 UTC 5 years ago

I once configured a webserver on a rabbit microcontroller to output the temperature when the IP was pinged. Had a couple of HTML pages and the feeling was immense.

But now its just application programming......

[info]ga_woo

July 27 2006, 20:24:04 UTC 5 years ago

This is really not about applications vs. systems programming. It's about how you began.

[info]ga_woo

5 years ago

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[info]anantj

August 1 2006, 07:36:51 UTC 5 years ago

Damn! Now that thought brings a sense of programming inadequecy :(

[info]ga_woo

August 1 2006, 17:33:39 UTC 5 years ago

Alt-F7 F7? You too?

[info]anantj

5 years ago

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[info]strix_an_stones

August 21 2006, 19:48:21 UTC 5 years ago

...in college I had FORTRAN. I think we lost bigger :\

[info]ga_woo

August 22 2006, 02:32:41 UTC 5 years ago

Actually, all we were taught was FORTRAN and Pascal. We learnt C ourselves because it was supposed to get us jobs when we finished college or something.

[info]strix_an_stones

5 years ago

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[info]londonbard

August 22 2006, 16:02:33 UTC 5 years ago

Thank you for putting up that "Interests Meme". It was beautiful, (mine was, anyway.)

[info]ga_woo

August 26 2006, 10:43:40 UTC 5 years ago

You're welcome. And thank you :)

[info]noelladsa

September 8 2006, 07:04:07 UTC 5 years ago

Even Joel agrees ;)

[info]ga_woo

September 8 2006, 15:25:41 UTC 5 years ago

Woe

[info]xxhelloworldxx

September 8 2006, 16:19:44 UTC 5 years ago

Doesn't mean you can't keep leaning, doll!

[info]ga_woo

September 9 2006, 07:58:24 UTC 5 years ago

Learning doesn't mean I've ever going to be among the very best :)

Anonymous

September 24 2006, 20:01:18 UTC 5 years ago

I too started with Turbo C++

That isn't something new for someone in India. All of undergrad students work in labs on TC.

I personally started with some BASIC at school but TC was where I caught interest.

But somehow it ain't geeky enough to say that we started in TurboC.. Maybe we say "I started with small programs for 16-bit machines".. Sounds a bit better, doesnt it :D

Anonymous

October 7 2006, 11:34:22 UTC 5 years ago

Why I'm a Great Programmer

TRS-80 Model III.

[info]ga_woo

October 7 2006, 11:49:27 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Why I'm a Great Programmer

I didn't say that there was a corollary :P

Anonymous

October 9 2006, 19:10:53 UTC 5 years ago

Trash 80 model 1 basic -> z80 machine code -> turbo c -> turbo c++ -> borland c -> msvc 1.51 -> msvc 5 -> msvc 6 -> msvc 2003 *pukes* -> msvc 6

Anonymous

October 9 2006, 23:59:36 UTC 5 years ago

Hrm... Then what does this mean.

My first programming that I can remember was with this:

Vtech Precomputer 1000 (http://rasterweb.net/raster/computers/vtech.html)

Is there any hope for me, or am I stuck at being a good programmer?

Anonymous

October 10 2006, 02:18:33 UTC 5 years ago

Nobody says, "When I grow up, I wanna be a junkie."

but that's what i've ended up... a Microsoft developer!

and yes, i got started down that road to perdition with Borland products... turbo pascal and then turbo C++.


;-)

Anonymous

October 16 2006, 19:25:49 UTC 5 years ago

The real reason

The reason why these people are great programmers is because the farther you go back in time the less complicated computers get. It is easy to understand everything that’s going on under the hood of an early HP calculator. To be a great programmer you really have to know what is going on underneath, how the machine works and what exactly it is doing. And once you have this base, build upon it.

Now, the reason YOU are never going to be a great programmer is because instead of hitting eBay and picking up a used C64 for $25 and figuring out just what these people know that you don’t, you invent excuses and give up.
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