Learning Programming

My relationship with programming has a long and sordid past. We got our first computer when I was very young, and I was immediately transfixed by this devil machine. How did it possibly work?? This curiosity got me a handful of vague enough answers to temporarily satisfy me, and I went about playing Dune II. I remember at one point creating a file, adding .exe on the end, and telling people that I “wrote my first program”. When they asked me what it did I had no answer.

Years later I started to realize that I wanted more. I wanted to be able to command the machine. I knew this was possible to do through this thing called “programming”, though this was still vague. At one point I even said I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up. In retrospect, this skill seems valuable enough that I wish my parents had given me more of a push / support when I was younger – certainly we intend to introduce Lydia to Logo at a young age ourselves.

As it so happened, my dad did at one point give me a book about Java. I proceeded to do a few lessons, marvel at my ability to make the computer prompt me and spit out some text, and promptly forgot that it existed. [Read more…]