Nobody told me it’s impossible, so I did it | Hacker News Reader

Nobody told me it’s impossible, so I did it

blog.traysoft.com

89 pointsjv222229 comments

Here's a demotivational post :) No one says it's not possible to learn programming this way. In fact, I'm sure almost everyone here has a similar story (mine even includes the paper programming). What I wish I found out earlier than I did is that no one finds this impressive.

I wrote assembler code for my HP48 on paper well before I typed it into the device when I was doing anything remotely complex.

I wonder if I'm missing anything by starting in a text editor these days...

You actually had a much simpler problem back then. For most domains, programming involves dealing with more complicated languages, machines, and APIs.

Compared to what most of the kids his age were probably doing? I'm impressed.

I'd actually go so far as to say that anyone not impressed either doesn't understand what he did, or has a badly miscalibrated scale of what counts as impressive.

How many people in life find their calling and create it completely by their own hands? We are in one of the unique fields where don't need a degree to make a good living. Yes, many of us are self-starters, but if this post inspires one kid to join the fold, I think it's worth front-page HN.

ok, so it's true i wasn't impressed, but it did bring a smile to my face, reminding me of my own "similar story" (no girlfriend, back then, and the person i knew who had a zx81 refused to type in my wonderful handwritten code :o)

so just because it's not impressive doesn't mean it can't be appreciated (also, are you serious about your final remark? - i knew way before then that being smart wasn't something to "show off")

Yeah, I didn't read that post as being meant to impress necessarily, just motivate. So, the fact that lots of people start early is even more motivating for those who have been told it's too hard.

I still have the 3-ring binder containing, among other early projects, my first BASIC program written for my Timex Sinclair 1000. I was also oblivious to some of the basic structures of BASIC so there's a ton of repetition. It's fun to go back and look at some of my notes and scribbles from over 20 years ago. Fun for me, boring as hell for anyone else.

Guys, I didn't write that story to show off. Sorry if it comes out this way. Of course tons of people here did much more impressive things. I see a lot of people who want to do something like start a business or change career and they get discouraged by everyone saying it's hard and not worth doing. I just wanted to motivate them and tell them that it doesn't matter what others are saying.

And I had a girlfriend at 14 who by the end of high school messed me so much that I spent first 2 years in college avoiding girls completely. But that's not a Hacker News story ;)

I, for one, was motivated... thanks!

I don't think it sounded like you were showing off at all. It was a cool story. I think a lot of people are just inferring that you were implying that your story was unique (that's a lot of assuming going on there) and it's not, so they were balking at it because they've had similar experiences or what have you. Sure, it may be BTDT to a lot of folks (brought back fond memories for me), but when you're 14 and doing it and discovering for the first time it, it's awesome and that is inspiring. I think we sometimes forget how exciting learning and just putting ourselves out there can be.

Random people on the internet can be a tough bunch to please...

I'm not impressed as much as jealous. Sure, maybe your program was very crude by most standards, but the amount of stuff you did figure out on your own was great! It sounds like you had a lot of fun in the process.

Figuring things out mostly independently, without a teacher telling you what to do next, is among life's most sublime and transient joys. I sometimes regret the knowledge I've obtained the "easy" way, because I know I'll never have the experience of discovering it myself. But alas, ars longa, vita brevis.

"It was great! I could put GOTO on an empty line and write additional code on a separate piece of paper. I know all programmers are laughing reading this, but I was happy that I didn't have to squeeze several lines of code into one line in the notepad anymore!"

That reminds me of line numbers, counting by 10s, and then using line 15 if you needed to put something in between 10 and 20. I am just glad I discovered gosub before goto.

BBC BASIC had "RENUMBER" which would renumber your lines for you if things started getting tight!

If I recall correctly, RENUMBER only renumbered lines, but not the GOTO and GOSUB labels, so it was pretty useless after all :)

The best thing you could do was to stick to the practice of labeling by multiples of ten, and if you needed to hack something, you could still do it in one or two lines.

But basically programming in BASIC was hacking :)

Apparently it had quite strange semantics, presumably for ease of implementation:

http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic/manual/bbckey4.html#renum...

  > If I recall correctly, RENUMBER only renumbered
  > lines, but not the GOTO and GOSUB labels, so it
  > was pretty useless after all :)

You remember incorrectly. I've just gone and confirmed that the labels and references are all changed.

FWIW, we've had BBC BASIC programs running commercially in the field in a semi-embedded context for over ten years and they are still running perfectly. It's perfectly possible to do structured progamming in BBC BASIC.

If you issued a RENUMBER command with sufficiently nonsensical parameters (you gave it, I think, the first line number and the increment), the result was the error message "Silly.", which was (1) unusually casual-sounding and (2) not mentioned anywhere in the manuals. I can still remember the brief flash of OMG-it's-alive panic that hit me when my computer first told me I was silly.

Ah, I remember doing that, and writing code on paper. I had a green Mead spiral notebook full of TI-BASIC code. Then I would sit and type it into the computer (a TI99) and then save it to tape... which was an actual audio cassette tape, in a separate tape player, with the mic input shoved up next to the computer's speaker.

My dad and his friend, who also had a TI99 would transmit programs back and forth to each other over the 2 meter HAM bands late at night. One of them would hold the radio mic keyed next to the computer's speaker and the other would be holding the radio speaker up to the mic input on the computer.

The smileys are distracting. I am not against them in principle, I think they can add a layer of emotion above that conveyed purely by the words (I think of it as an internet form of prosody); however, in this case they are over-used and distract from the overall quality of the post.

Ironically, I was distracted by what I initially assumed was your use of a "frowny-winky" after "prosody."

You must have a tough time reading C code.

Well, it certainly isn't impossible. As a matter of fact, I'd argue the opposite - that it's impossible to really learn anything without being inspired and motivated. I know the only times I've really learned things is during bouts of excitement, and the smartest people I know just get excited very easily :)

Sure, some people go through learning motivated by impressing their peers or satisfying their parents/teachers/bosses. But they're not really learning in the true way, now are they?

If batch programming had not existed long before, he would have reinvented it. :-)

Heck, my first exposure to programming was by way of a textbook that used a nonexistant decimal machine's assembler; presumably I could have submitted my code to a simulator had I been attending the right college, but I was only in seventh grade at the time.

Show of hands: who hasn't ever played computer with their code?

I stopped reading when he mentioned that he had a girlfriend when he was 14. Was there anything else he did that was remarkable? ;)

I started in BASIC on a Sharp MZ-700 (a horrible machine) but in 1988 I got a Commodore 64 as a gift, along with a book (Programming the 6502) and got to grips with assembly after a christmas present: a freezer cartridge and a floppy disk drive. It was the best christmas present ever.

Further on, my C64 interest became an obsession and I dropped out of school - though passing some exams - and even led to me hacking PBX's and blue boxing across the USA (I live in the UK). But again - I don't regret any of it!

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