TIS-100 brought back some of the same joy that I had when I began with programming many years ago. Since then programming has become boring for me, but the weird limitations of TIS-100 almost made it feel like I was starting fresh again. I loved learning tons of small tricks that I could apply to beat the harder levels.
For me the fun of programming came back when I allowed myself to do things that are completely useless, apart from the fact that it brings me joy. It started with 6502 assembly programming for a breadboard computer I built. Right now I am programming C using old Borland tools on an old MS DOS computer. Again, super useless, but oh so fun.
And who knows, maybe this new knowledge will be useful professionally one day (I learned a lot about very low level computer concepts, and I didn’t know C before), but that is totally not the goal. Just the absence of the pressure to be useful brought back all the fun for me.
Thank you for posting this. I've been meaning to get back into programming for fun recently but have been struggling to find something I wanted to work on.
As someone who walked away from programming two years ago, reading this stirred something in my heart that I honestly haven't felt since quitting. I've been frankly surprised that I haven't had the desire to code in that time, but it turns out I am nostalgic about the times when coding was a fun process of self discovery.
This article gives me the inkling of a way back to get back to there. Thanks to whoever shared it.
There must be some out there like me, who used to love programming but then got burnt out or bored with it for some reason, then rediscovered it years later and fell in love all over again?
I'd like to read your stories. How did you fall in love with programming again?
Programming _is_ like riding a bike...after a brief reimmersion. Maybe a little wobbly at first, but it's never taken me long to jump back into something that used to be an old friend.
I used to have this job where all you did all day was put second hand clothes into this huge hydraulic press, you'd press a button and out would come a nicely wrapped bale of clothes. It was absolutely mind meltingly numb job, it required absolutely zero skill and you'd repeat the same motion over and over and over again.
But you know what? I still remember the feeling that you had at the end of the day, seeing stacks upon stacks of these bales, nicely filling the warehouse, how satisfying this was.
I don't remember the last time I felt like that when programming.
After 15 years in the corporate world I've almost forgotten those exciting early days of programming. This article brought back the joy I felt when I figured out how to make the bad guy "home in" on the good guy - that was a turning point for me!
I need to do some true recreational programming again - just for the pure joy of it.
I know what you mean, there is all that nostalgia of going through that book so many years ago and learning the programming constructs that would benefit all of us professionally for years to come.
Yeah me too. I had great fun and learnt so much. When I ended up doing a little Windows programming at work some years later - I couldn't believe how horrible it was compared to Intuition. No surprise my career majored on *nix. :)
The first app I opened up was ResEdit; the jack-in-the-box gave me a big wave of nostalgia...
But yeah, it's hard to separate fond memories of youth from the changes in computing. Plus when I was a kid learning HyperTalk and then C on System 7 it was all for fun; no one was asking anything of me. Now my coding supports my family; I haven't done any coding for fun since a few years ago when I took a sabbatical from my SDE job and worked half-time as a farm hand.
Me too. As someone who used to be a dev but hasn't written code professionally in twelve years or so, it was such an amazing accelerant. My iteration loop was to contextualize it (in English and in code), ask how to do a thing, look at its response, tweak it, execute, see what happened, alter it some more.
The fact that it usually had errors didn't bother me at all -- it got much of the way there, and it did so by doing the stuff that is slowest and most boring for me: finding the right libraries / functions / API set up, structuring the code within the broader sweep.
Interesting side note: un-popular languages, but ones that have been around for a long time and have a lot of high-quality and well-documented code / discussion / projects around, are surprisingly fecund. Like, it was surprisingly good at elisp, given how fringe that is.
Shenzhen I/O otoh felt like work.
reply