19
The day a mentor showed me his first line of code from 1985
He pulled out a floppy disk at a coding meetup in Portland and let me read a BASIC program he wrote for a class project. Has anyone else had an older coder show you something they made back in the early days just to prove everyone starts somewhere?
3 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In3 Comments
ray_burns3d ago
Oh man that takes me back. A buddy of mine who was coding since the early 80s showed me his first program once too. It was this goofy little text adventure game he wrote in BASIC on a Commodore 64. Just a bunch of IF/THEN statements and random GOTO jumps. Looked like a total mess by modern standards but you could tell he poured his heart into it. He said it took him like three months just to get the inventory system working. Makes you realize how far we've come when people today complain about frameworks being hard to learn.
7
blake_kelly193d ago
Funny you mention the GOTO spaghetti, but what always gets me is how manual everything was back then. Like your buddy probably had to hand-write his code on paper first before even typing it in, debugging was basically staring at a screen for hours hoping a typo jumps out at you. Meanwhile my nephew asked me how to center a div last week and almost lost his mind when I mentioned flexbox lol. Really puts the "struggle" into perspective when devs now can just Google "inventory system C#" and copy paste the first result.
5