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The thing that made me realize this was compilers!

"Wait, code is just text?"

"Always has been"

I still have to remind myself of this sometimes when I think "woah, how does this work?" and then I try to step through how it might be built.

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I don’t know that code was always text, but I’m thankful to have been born in the days after programming assembly on punch cards was not the only way.

The early days of programming was also text in the form of pencil on paper, then the program was transferred to the machine in various manual ways, such as flipping toggle switches, followed by punch cards. But the actual process of writing programs was always text. Even before electronic computers people wrote down algorithms to be executed by themselves on paper, or by rooms full of people whose job title was ‘computer’.

My first experience of programming was a 1970s 8085 kit with a hex keypad and a few digits of 7 segment LED display. The only book was Intel's technical reference manual for the 8085, and my first big project (a full year university project) involved conceiving the right program, writing it on paper in assembly language, hand assembling it, entering it as hex (a few hundred bytes). It worked first time because it pretty much had to work first time so I was very very careful.

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