How I Fell in Love with Computer Programming

I can remember the day quite vividly when I got my first taste of how a computer really works. At the time, I was 13, on vacation in Florida with my family, and just by chance got curious about HTML. Like many tourists do, we explored the local area and soon found ourselves at the local bookstore. Quickly, I rushed to the back of the unfamiliar  store and scoured the shelves of the “Technology/Computer” section. This section only a few weeks earlier had seemed so strange to me. I thought “Buy a book about computers, why would anyone want to do that?”. But  my callow instincts were soon proven wrong when I discovered a book, sitting on the middle shelf, titled  HTML In 5 Minutes. I squawked at the title thinking how silly the concept was ; it reminded me of those silly dieting programs that seemed to be so popular a few years ago.  However, I decided to purchase the book and give this whole programming business a shot. I read long through that humid Florida day, delving into topics such as the insignificance of the” <meta>” tag, and the emerging new world of Cascading Style Sheets. Of course, HTML is not really a programming language, it’s a markup language, but nonetheless I was hooked. 

The  first page I can remember writing was one involving an embedded Chris Pirillo live stream flash player, with some gaudy looking  multi-colored text that read,  “The Chris Pirillo Show”. Mind you, this was during a  period in my life  when I was very much into Chris Pirillo, a bit before I stumbled upon the netcasts of Leo Laporte ; however, I soon became bored with this markup language and decided to learn a legitimate “Programming Language”. A friend of mine, who I have since lost touch with, introduced me to this language called Perl. My eyes lit up with excitement as he told me about a project he was working on. “Oh wow. And what do all of those dollar signs mean?” I asked eagerly, waiting to be educated about this mysterious language. “Well, in Perl variables are represented by the dollar sign.” , he responded sounding like an expert. Probing him more, I soon got excited enough about wanting to learn Perl that I ran out to my local bookstore and picked up what turned out to be the definitive Perl book. It is called Learning Perl and is authored by Randal L.  Schwartz, Brian D Foy, and Tom Phoenix. What caught my eye was the cover of this book, it has a llama centered looking curiously out to the right.  Most of us would imagine a programming book to be drab and miserable, but Learning Perl  is quite the book. In fact, the very first page is filled with jokes, notably the inordinate number of footnotes, that sometimes are filled with humorous commentary. Jump to a year later, and I am fairly well-versed in Perl, and have been a frequent guest of Randal Schwartz’s karaoke stream on Ustream, appropriately titled “The Randal Schwartz Experiment”. 

I guess my purpose for writing this post was to debunk the longstanding myth that computer programming is boring. Sure, there are moments when you will feel like sticking your finger in the blades of an automatic hole punching machine, but then there is that moment when you run your code and see the result. It really is a gratifying experience that makes you feel like you’ve really got power over your computer, like you are reaching in and saying “Hey you! Run that Bytecode now!”. For me, it is just a hobby, but there may be some of you reading this post who end up writing code for a living. Maybe it is not as glamorous as being a trashy paperback novel writer, but it feels good when you can do something that most  of the  computer using population is clueless about. They are busy enough trying to get their printer to work properly, let alone hack Perl or dabble in Applescript, PHP, Python, E.T.C. To all of you who have bothered to read my first post here on thecreativeone.tv Social Blog, I thank you.

Comments

[Danny Luksa]

Interesting story!