I'm tasked with making a speech tomorrow at school. Interesting. To fill the gaping void of my blog, I decided to write it up here too.
Note to those who shared these experiences I'm telling here with me: this is obviously a bit dramatized and I'm pulling the years mostly out of my arse. They might be correct, but their exact correctness doesn't matter to my message.
Specs of this speech are: 5 minutes of talk about a subject somehow relating to my profession of choice, with optional ppt-diashow.
So, hello everybody. I'm Feuer and I've come here today to tell you of my history as a programmer. I might draw some nice conclusions along the way, but let's not go there yet.
Let's return to the year of our lord 2005. It's christmas. I've caught cold just in time for the holidays. At 24th the sun rises, sun sets and somewhere along the evening Santa Claus arrives. Cool. The best part of christmas has arrived for the 12-year-old me. I open the minor presents, which I sadly can't recite anymore almost a decade after. Then I get to the last, surprisingly heavy present. I tear the wrappings off. It seems to be a new bag. Whatever has Santa thought I'd need that for? It was way too heavy and small to be used as a schoolbag. Fortunately I get my thoughts together and check if the bag contains some surprise.
It did
(META: It wasn't exactly that computer, but it was some sort of presario from early -00s. I seem to have forgotten the model and unfortunately have got rid of the computer)
There was a used Compaq from early -00s. She had some sort of duron, 128MB of RAM and a real S3-graphics chip. OS was XP. With that beauty I really began my career. I played the first two Age of Empires games and the Age of Mythology deity knows how much. I think I also began my first really long prose with her. We shared so many great moments I've not been able to relive with any of my later computers.
But I don't think you're here to listen about my first love. You want to know how that computer prepared me for this education and profession.
As an avid gamer I had always wanted to make a game. One fine day in the summer of -06 I was visiting a friend. We were playing with a computer, or something. The day before I had downloaded Coolbasic, but as the code seemed incomprehensible (albeit being almost pure, imperative, english). I took a glance on it and decided I'd try to understand it later. That day I was considering on removing the whole programming environment, for I probably wouldn't understand a thing of it or its tutorials.
Then my friend's father, my idol in the context of computers, arrived to the scene. "Feuer, do you know how to program a computer?" he asked. "Well.. I have downloaded a thing. I don't know how to use it though." I told him. "You should learn to. It's a nice feeling to hold a complete command of the computer in your fingertips" he said the truest words I have ever heard anyone speaking.
That inspired me to change the way I had approached programming. Instead of probably never understanding a thing of it, I decided, like I had so many times before as a kid done, to understand the trade as well as it's possible to in one lifetime. I learned (Cool)basic, hacking with it until I could tear the very seams of the runtime interpreter open.
My hardware got upgraded a few times during that era. Two years later I had moved from a 128MT/XP-laptop to a 4GB/Vista - self-assembled desktop computer.
By 2010 I began to be fed up with the limitations of the environment. I learned enough C++
to be dangerous. I spent a few months trying to hack an implementation of a game design of mine with C++ & SDL. I never got a finished product, but I got enough scars and knowledge to gain a new perspective on this field. Programming can be hard and most programmers seem to like pain in great amounts.
After the first half of 2011 I spoke fluently Java and C#
. With C# I've never had a specific goal in mind, it has just been a nicer java with lousier 2D-drawing libraries. With Java I've always been on the road to implement my game any day now. Back in -11, instead of actually listening in the programming classes of my vocational school I proved my worth to the lecturer by implementing a two-dimensional tile map editor in Java. He was a great teacher, manipulated me to attend the classes and stay silent by providing helpful feedback when I got stuck. When I wasn't stuck, he stayed out of my way, as long as I passed the tests. I did, usually with the best grades. Our school could probably learn a thing or two of this way of teaching programming.
At some point I also learned PHP. I used it to write my first, self-written vulnerabilities. Fortunately my PHP-dabbling has happened with my own websites, which are to be expected to be of lower quality for being a playground for a newbie programmer.
By the end of 2012 C# and Java, those I had written all my desktop stuff in and had used professionally, began to feel a bit painful to write in. I asked why I have to write ten lines to just write "Hello world!" to console. I also asked if one could cheat the compiler to write some of the final code from a template. I also wondered why Visual Studio, the environment programmers tend to regard highly, leans so much on mouse. Are we not programmers, whose main tool is the keyboard!? If using a bloody mouse is so loved by many, why are we all not coding with Android-tablets?
I found Lisp. It answered my questions: you don't have to write a book to get a string to console. It's just (format t "Hello world!"). AST-manipulating macros of Lisp are templateish functions that generate and return new parts to AST in the compile phase. Emacs, the editor used by almost every Lisp aficionado, prides itself on not requiring mouse.
All the languages before the Lisp felt like work. They were almost the same language, with variable amounts of complexity and insanity thrown in. Lisp, however, was different. People who have designed it in the 50 years it has existed were not after pragmatism, which I think is a synonym for complexity in the proglang communities. They were university-folk making a tool that made them easier to do really smart things. That feels to be a major design principle in the language: keeping it simple, yet powerful.
Once I figured this principle out, I began to ask myself a lot of questions like "Why is this thing so complex?" and "Why isn't this thing half as powerful as it could be?". This, and better supported lisp-environments and emacs-packages, led me out of the world of Windows. Suddenly I realized I'm using Arch Linux, the operating system that optimizes best the axes of usability and simplicity. I'm crying literal tears every time I have to not be inside Emacs. In my ideal world, I'd be writing server-softaware in Lisp (META: probably Clojure) without foul things like X bothering me. Or possible some system-level stuff with C
In conclusion: after a decade I finally think I have some sort of idea how this thing called programming is done.
Also, in Finland, the promised land of Microsoft and Java, I fear I'm almost unemployable for not liking languages that aren't Lisp. (and to strengthen the joke here, let me add a smiley:) :D.
Thank you, any questions?
META:
It seems I have about 1400 words by now. Wish me luck in transforming this into an oral presentation.
