My first program was binary search

melitamihaljevic.blogspot.com

14 points·mmihaljevic··9 comments

Conway's 'Game of Life' in FORTRAN on an IBM 360. Hardly the third grade, that would have been in 1955. My next program was a 'Key Words in Context' generator written in BAL, likewise for a 360 (370 by the time I finished[model switch over should give you a clue as to when this was :)])---haven't stopped since and still continue to enjoy the creative addiction that programming brings to the game.

The 360 was delivered in 1965. Conway's Game of Life was devised in 1970.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't 1955. :-)

He was in the 3rd grade in 1955. He wrote his first computer program sometime after 1970, on a 360. Therefore he did not write his first computer program in 3rd grade.

Ah, yes. My reading comprehension was slow that night :-).

It wasn't quite my first program, but during one of my introductory high school programming courses I independently derived binary search (though of course I didn't realize it at the time). Additionally, this was well before I discovered what recursion was (I wonder if anyone else vividly remembers having their mind blown the first time they were introduced to recursion).

The funny part is that I abandoned the binary search strategy nearly immediately after conceiving it. Why? Because I realized that the array needed to be sorted in order for the search to work... and, at the time, the only sorting routine that I knew of was bubble sort. :)

Go FER, go FER, go girl!

I'm not seeing a blog post.

I'm using Chrome 18.0.1025.168 (Developer Build 134367).

Same. I had to turn NoScript off.

Why the author chose to require javascript for this blog is beyond me. :/

I choose dynamic look via Google blogger. It's probably why you cannot see it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com