Hacker News Reader

Comment by evo_9 | Hacker News Reader

"4 years of a serious, programming intensive CS degree is better training than 20 years of farting around with PHP."

That's really funny and true.

Yeah, agreed, I know plenty of CS degree holders that are top notch coders as well. But I have to say, I don't think a single one of them hadn't learned a language or two prior to college and I doubt they ever thought for a second 'I'm not sure how to program'.

View on HN

I thought C was totally terrifying and confusing for the longest time. I started in Visual Basic because it had WSYWIG forms, and I just couldn't imagine how someone would programmatically construct an interface. Feeling like you have no idea where to start is completely legitimate. I eventually faced it, though, and got through it. Of course, I was 11 or 12 at the time, but still.

I also learned C at that age, but I was excited about it. My motivation was thorough disgust at the limitations of QBasic and VB, which a friend and I had been running into in our more ambitious video game projects.

If you want to know how to programmatically construct an interface, fart around with a Tcl/Tk tutorial for a bit. That's very interactive and easy. It's a good way to get your head around the general idea.

I agree that C can be terrifying and confusing at first. The buggy GCC of the late 1980's/early 90's was not friendly for beginners. One of the class project's bugs disappeared for no reason when we changed the order of function definitions in one file.

It gets easier once you a) learn assembly language and b) write a compiler. Fart around with some CoreWars and Google "NAND to Tetris."

You were unlucky, I went the other way. I did start on basic on my Z80 machine, but since you could only really write adventure games with basic, I moved onto Z80 assembly language. Then, I moved onto x86 assembly language.

Every from that point has been easier, in most ways.

I was lucky, everyone of my friends had a C64, and they were swapping games. We couldn't afford a C64 at AU$399 at the time, so they got me the VZ300 for $99. I had to write my own games. This is how I got into development.

I was one of the few that could program, before I went to Uni. It was around the time that CS was becoming very popular, but hadn't start to differentiate between different sorts of IT, so they offered everything. The classes I found best were hardware, OS, and the half year class were we had to write the same program in 4 different languages.

I think I'm considerably younger than you. The only reason I ever needed assembly was to patch executables without source in my GUI OS; the days of insane resource constraints were already gone.

Hah, that makes two of us! Except iI didn't have the luxury of a Z80, I started on an 8080 that didn't even run CP/M... Ahhh the Compulcolor II, what a fine machine you were. At least you made me learn how a computer works.

I still remember how good it felt when my brother started loading up the games that I wrote rather than the few 'commercial' games that we had for the system.

PS: VZ300??? I thought I knew everything about the Australian 8-bit computer scene, but I managed to miss that one.

The VZ300 was made by Dick Smith, a successor to the VZ200. It had a huge hacker user community, their were program listings and hardware mods in APC magazine. After the VZ line, Dick smith bought out there CAT computer line, which were much more powerful, and more expensive.

Great little machine for $100. Funny thing, the VZ200 had a chiklet keyboard, which are becomming popular again. One of the big selling points of the VZ300 was that it had a proper keyboard.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=...

To do Assembly language programming I had to get the 16KB upgrade kit, which was this huge piece of hardware that stuck in the back.

I feel like having an aptitude for programming at least will incline you to dapple before college.

Actually you guys are probably right. I should clarify that I am in my mid 30s. When I was a kid computers were still mostly for nerds. There was no broadband internet. It was kind of a pain in the ass to program anything other than BASIC. If you wanted to use another language chances are you had to buy the compiler. Thus, it's not 100% unusual that I have peers who didn't program until college. Especially guys from countries where it was really hard and expensive to buy a computer in the 80s.

Now that everyone has had a computer and serious internet since about age 8 it would actually be pretty weird if they hadn't tried programming at all before college.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com