Then It Began
It is a phrase that Micheal Feathers uses in his preface to his book, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, when he describes the start of his passion for programming. As a software developer, I’d also like to share with you how I got into this programming world. I was in 6th grade of elementary school when my older brother got his first PC. It was Intel 8088 (so-called PC XT at that time). At first, I used that PC for playing games when my brother went to the college. Yea, playing games was very interesting at that time, although the graphics look archaic if we compare it with current games.
Later on, I read my brother’s book about programming in BASIC language. Well, since childhood, I was always interested in reading books related to science and technology. My intention when reading the book was that I wanted to know how to make all interesting things happened on a computer, like all the games I had played. Then it began. I immediately got very excited about programming. I don’t really remember what my first program was, but I still remember that feeling, the joy of making things work on a computer. One of my early programs was a plain arcade game showing two helicopters shooting each other, one controlled by the player, and the other one by the computer.
When I went to junior high, my interest in programming was still intense. I started to learn Pascal and structured programming. I also learned about pointer and all the things made possible by the use of pointer concept. It was very hard for me at that time, to break the habit of using the infamous GOTO statement. Only after some exposures to structured programming, I was finally able to write somewhat large programs without GOTO. My greatest achievement in Pascal programming was a tennis game, that was quite enjoyable to play (for me, at least). Well, I was still a youngster, so it was not unusual if many programs I created were games and the like.