What was your first programming language?
From
LaRRy LaGoMoRpH@VERT/GRUDGEDU to
eric on Mon Apr 7 06:58:16 2014
Re: What was your first programming language?
By: eric to All on Thu Jul 18 2013 06:30 pm
I've taken a slightly different path with regards to programming, and I took 20 years off, but my first programming language was Hypertalk on the Macintosh. Anyhow, I don't know if anyone ever used Hypercard back in the day. my dad worked for apple thru 84-94 and i used to get a few CD-ROMs that would have all the site licensed software for Apple as well as employee Applelink acess which allowed me to really tinker with stuff I had no right to be messing with. but hypercard was my favorite, because i could make my own stuff in it. it didn't give you much low level access, but that wasn't the point.
i remember i could make a simple game with graphics and a user interface during study hall at school. people say that if hypercard had figured out to add network connectivity between the apps, it could have been what is now our World Wide Web. You could draw in it, program, add UI elements, build simple databases.
anyhow, no one took hypercard seriously and i still don't think there's anything out there like it. for some reason, i thought the lessons i learned in hypercard wouldn't really apply to other programming, and while nothing is that simple, squeezing something more complicated out of something that is pretty simple or figuring out what somebody else did to do that.
i only remember one piece of hypercard code, and it was the piece of code that let me take my games from just using animations to being able to interrupt them and be able to interact with the objects as they were moving :
if the click then click the clicklock
it's not solving the davinci code, but i defnitely had my own version of wack-a-mole.
fast forward to 4 months ago, very little coding done in the last 20 years, i start up synchronet and start poking around in the javascript, and now i can do a lot with it. i think anyone who can program and uses synchronet should learn javascript even if they're not into the web. that's why i learned it, and now i found out it's useful for other stuff as well. i was dreading coding after taking so much time off, but once i got familiar with what i was working with relative ease. i am learning some more stuff now on codeacademy and flying through it, although i'm sure i'll need to reference all that stuff again when I need to actually sit down and start working on this next project, which i'm gonna have to use PHP for.
the hardest part for me about getting back into it is not so much the logic, but getting the separate pieces to go together. because i learned on
hypercard which had a lot of pieces built in to make something complex seem simple. that's why i liked learning javascript by tinkering with synchronet, because really there aren't massive amounts of libraries to learn and there are plenty of people doing javascript stuff on the web. you can do something in synchronet that people will think is unique. i think if i had started javascript with some sort of intent of doing something cool on the web i would have gotten annoyed, and i probably wouldn't have bothered to get back into code if i did because i'm not a huge web guy, as many BBS guys aren't.
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þ Synchronet þ FutureLand www.grudgemirror.com OR telnet grudgedu.synchr