[HN Gopher] My Programming Journey
___________________________________________________________________
My Programming Journey
Author : ingve
Score : 29 points
Date : 2024-06-05 08:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gavinhoward.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gavinhoward.com)
| jmclnx wrote:
| >Before I was born, my father somehow went from a farmboy to a
| college-educated programmer at a time when programming wasn't
| even a "real job" (early 1980s).
|
| Same here, I was a warehouse worker. I took a pay cut for this
| move, but I loved the work. Little did I know what the future
| held :)
|
| Very nice read.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Thank you for the compliment. I was not feeling very happy
| today, and that helped.
| dkarl wrote:
| When I was a kid, programming was something I did to screw
| around and procrastinate my real studies. I saw it as one or
| two steps up from video games or crossword puzzles on the
| spectrum from "waste of time" to "valuable self-development."
|
| My dad, who hated computers with a passion but could see them
| becoming more and more pervasive in society, always thought
| that being "good with computers" would be something I could
| fall back on if I had to. He was right. That's basically how I
| ended up in my first software development job, which I enjoyed
| enough that I eventually decided to pursue it as a career.
| gtsnexp wrote:
| The path to mastery is nonlinear and fraught with obstacles that
| extend beyond technical knowledge
| herodotus wrote:
| > programming wasn't even a "real job" (early 1980s)
|
| This made me laugh. You young-uns! I earned my first money for
| programming in 1970. I wrote, in IBM 360 assembly language, a
| "subroutine" to compute square-root, using a Chebechev polynomial
| to get a close approximation, and two iterations of Newton's
| algorithm to get the required precision. I got a job with Control
| Data Corp (as a COBOL programmer) a year or so later. But the
| real point of my laugh is that real jobs in programming probably
| started in the early 1950s.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Author here. Yeah, I know. That's why I put it in quotes. Also,
| I rushed this post out; I didn't intend to see it here.
| velcrovan wrote:
| "real" here can be shorthand for "popularly recognized", e.g.
| "pretty much everyone recognizes it as a useful vocation and
| has a general idea what it involves".
|
| It's not to say you couldn't get paid to do it in 1955. But if
| in 1955 you told someone at the hair salon or the bar that you
| were a "programmer", you would get funny looks [?] 100% of the
| time.
| dkarl wrote:
| They would probably think you handled programming for a local
| movie theater, arts organization, performance venue, or
| something like that. But my guess is they would find it an
| odd way to say it.
| ravenstine wrote:
| My dad was just talking to me about his experiences going to
| school and college in the 70s and, while he learned to use
| FORTRAN on a time-shared mainframe, programming or computer
| science as a career path wasn't advertised to him as a
| possible career path. Most administrators and guidance
| counselors at the time probably didn't understand those
| fields yet. Might have been different if my dad went to
| Berkeley, but it would not surprise me if most of the
| education didn't see programming as "real" yet.
|
| Heck, the web was almost brand new when I was in elementary
| school, and there was only one teacher who decided to take
| the initiative and teach kids HTML. He wasn't even my normal
| teacher, and I think I kind of just got pulled into it for
| some reason. In any case, I carried those skills he taught me
| all the way into adulthood, and I'm a web developer today! If
| he didn't host that class, I might not have ever bothered
| learning about Web technology. Otherwise, it wasn't like
| computer skills were part of the curriculum beyond learning
| to type.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| Weird. When I was in Grade 12 in 1967, someone from IBM
| came to our school to talk about computing careers. I
| graduated in the first B.Sc. class in computer science at
| the University of British Columbia in 1971. Virtually
| everyone I knew in the class had a computing job on
| graduation (I didn't, apart from a part-time job, because I
| wanted to do grad studies). Maybe Vancouver wasn't then the
| backwater we thought it was.
| herodotus wrote:
| Maybe. At CDC I my job title was Systems Analyst.
| mgussekloo wrote:
| That was a nice article, and it reminded me that programming
| truly is a weird journey. The destination is almost certainly not
| the point of it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-06 23:03 UTC)