I taught myself QuickBasic as it was the only thing I knew that was related to copying C64 BASIC out of magazines. (QBasic was packaged with DOS 3.11 I think and I was able to get a full copy of QuickBasic somehow. That was about +30 years ago? Dunno. I was about 12 at the time.) I didn’t know what other languages were out there besides TurboPascal. I did learn simple Pascal, but that was a short chapter.
I actually met someone else in the area that was learning to code, and of course, we wanted to write a game. The only way to code for a mouse at the time was to write an INT33 handler, so it kicked off our interest in asm. (I still use asm for MCU stuff on occasion, but it’s limited.) I quickly diverged into writing some really nifty… eh… “boot sector code” so that kicked off my career in security.
And yeah, it’s the same phenomenon for me: I just think in terms of bits and bytes getting shifted around and I still refuse to believe in “magic”. (Slight jab at Rust coders there, but in good fun.)
Fast forward to today, I train “kids” fresh out of college as part of my job now. The first thing I do is start giving them weird tasks that require they actually understand how something like an fopen() actually works.
(Funny story. I refused to “show my work” in math class for simple f(x) problems as I viewed it as unoptimized code. Lulz. I was such an autistic dork.)
I taught myself QuickBasic as it was the only thing I knew that was related to copying C64 BASIC out of magazines. (QBasic was packaged with DOS 3.11 I think and I was able to get a full copy of QuickBasic somehow. That was about +30 years ago? Dunno. I was about 12 at the time.) I didn’t know what other languages were out there besides TurboPascal. I did learn simple Pascal, but that was a short chapter.
I actually met someone else in the area that was learning to code, and of course, we wanted to write a game. The only way to code for a mouse at the time was to write an INT33 handler, so it kicked off our interest in asm. (I still use asm for MCU stuff on occasion, but it’s limited.) I quickly diverged into writing some really nifty… eh… “boot sector code” so that kicked off my career in security.
And yeah, it’s the same phenomenon for me: I just think in terms of bits and bytes getting shifted around and I still refuse to believe in “magic”. (Slight jab at Rust coders there, but in good fun.)
Fast forward to today, I train “kids” fresh out of college as part of my job now. The first thing I do is start giving them weird tasks that require they actually understand how something like an
fopen()actually works.(Funny story. I refused to “show my work” in math class for simple f(x) problems as I viewed it as unoptimized code. Lulz. I was such an autistic dork.)