What I learned from my first line of code, 15 years ago
it was so BASIC, and I was just a 5th-grader at that time
Indonesian 90’s child here. I spent my entire childhood with my parents and sisters in a small town Banjarmasin in South Borneo, quite far away from the capital city of Jakarta (i.e. Relatively under-developed compared to other provinces in Java)
The most influential person that makes me a programmer is my own dad. He is just a high-school graduated civil servant officer who never formally learn to program. He bought his first computer when I was toddler. I don’t really remember what type it was, all that I know was that it could be used for him to do his overtime job in WordStar and Lotus 123.
My adventure in programming starts when I found my dad’s old programming books while cleaning a dusty bookshelf. They were all written for BASIC language (GOTO and GOSUB anyone?). I read them all out of curiosity, then the epiphany strikes. It was very exciting to know how to tell computer to do what I want. I love this technology!
Despite being very excited to understand clearly how to do it, I was never actually write a real program. I could only mentally run it in my mind. It’s exciting and frustrating at the same time! The problem was that my computer was using Windows 98 which doesn’t have Quick BASIC interpreter as mentioned in the books I read. I didn’t know how to get or install it either. Doh.
Knowing my interest in programming, my dad decided to bring me to his office after school. Whoa, it has an unused old computer that has BASIC interpreter installed as part of MS DOS! Hurray!
I quickly became addicted to code regularly using my dad’s office’s computer. One of the best thing I have ever code that time was a program that makes my keyboard act like a piano. The musical note pitches for each keys were adjusted based on what I learned in music class in school. It was very fun until I realize that the program used CPU beep to make sounds. The beeps were so loud and couldn’t be turned down that it annoyed all my dad’s coworkers!
Looking back at those times, I can say BASIC was a perfect programming language to start with. The syntax is simple and intuitive. As a child, I could easily follow the code flow because all lines are explicitly numbered (yes, you type the line numbers literally) and you can GOTO anywhere by those numbers. I must admit it, flowchart’s branching taught in CS101 makes more sense if you apply it with “GOTO” than plain “IF” block statements.
But as I grow and learn many other programming languages, I realized that the convenience of GOTO actually leads to what we know as “spaghetti code”. It actually hard to follow the program execution flow and might introduces many unexpected results. Now I know the answer to my (once) frustration of its absence in modern languages.
Next, my adventure with Visual Basic, ActionScript, and Pascal.
