Hudson's first programming lesson. How early did you start programming?
ColdFusionI often hate to admit how late I came into programming. I first began writing ColdFusion code about 1999 after a longer-than-I-should-have-had "career" as a club DJ and lighting technician for about the previous 10 years. I often consider where I would be now if I had started 5 or even 10 years earlier. Then I remember the parties, the wild nights, and the reckless lifestyle I was able to get away with for so long and suddenly I don't really care anymore! :)
Hudson is my oldest of three kids at six. He has very recently learned to read and was just accepted into the talented and gifted program in his school. (Only 3 of 125 kindergartners were accepted!) He has very developed critical thinking skills and loves problem solving. When he was 5, I printed out a multiplication table and he immediately pointed out the patterns, and he has always liked when I quiz him on math problems. In fact, one night while we were out riding bikes and I was quizzing him, his younger brother Parker (3 at the time) felt a little left out wanting to play along so he said "What's 3 + H, Hudson?" I was about to say "Parker, you can't do math with letters", but before I could Hudson said "That depends on the value of H". My jaw about hit the dirt.... It is only a matter of time before he is outwitting me on a daily basis.
Recently we have been talking a lot about what it is I do for a living, and he has become very interested. I told him that when he begins to read we will start programming together. After telling him at dinner tonight that I spent part of my week battling cyber robots (well.... spam bots didn't sound nearly as cool), he said he wanted to sit with me while I work, so I thought tonight would be our first lesson.
It was very cool! I reminded him of the bike ride months ago and his answer about "3 + H", so we opened the CFEclipse scribble pad and started out with:
He really got it, and thought it was pretty cool to have a tangible view of how a variable works. Next we looked at <cfloop>, first by outputting his name 10 times in a row. After he saw how the loop work, we altered it just a bit on successive runs and he would predict what was going to happen as we moved ahead. We then tried to output variables that weren't yet defined, and he got to experience his first exception message!
Finally we made a very simple form with FirstName and LastName fields and posted to itself. As we walked through this I could see little bits of it clicking at a time. He is really looking forward to the next lesson. Hmmm... what to cover. How about <cfif>?
So, I can already envision Hudson bragging on the CF-Talk list in about 10 years: "I began programming when I was 6!" Hopefully this means free help with InstantSpot someday!
So, how early did you start programming? Have you taught your little ones?
Can't remember how old I was when I first started, but probably between 8 and 10 years old I'd guess, on the family's ZX Spectrum.
Starting with PCs in 1993, using RM BASIC at school, and moved over to with Delphi when they got Win 95 (in 96), followed about a year or two later by HTML+JS.
Didn't discover ColdFusion until 2002.
I don't have any little ones to teach, but if I ever do I think I'll put a laptop in their cot. :P
My first experience was when I was about 8 or 9 - we had a text based game for the C64 and I was pissed that I was stuck in a certain part of the game. So I printed out the code and found the string that they were looking for so I could beat the game. My parents then got me a '101 basic programs' book and I would program little 'hello world' type crap for fun. Fast forward about 20 years before I started doing it 'for a living' (which is about to end, but that's another story).
My 7 year old daughter loves working on the computer but hasn't really shown any interest in programming. She's more of the designer type - she loves TuxPaint!
I wrote my first program (1959) when I was in college at the University of Missouri School of Mines & Metallurgy (I think that was before acronyms), which was later renamed the University of Missouri @ Rolla (UMR), and soon to be renamed Missouri University of Science and Technology -- or Missouri S&T for short (Remember you heard it here first). Our first computer there was a Rand Corporation unit that filled an entire room and did much less than today’s calculators. It used thousands of vacuum tubes and magnetic-core memory. Each bit, not byte but bit, stored in memory was held in a separate toroid with read/write, address and erase wires running through it. There was no such thing as a floppy, a hard drive or even a magnetic tape drive.
These machines had a lot of blinking lights but no display and no keyboard. Entries were made by way of a paper tape (~3/4” wide and 10’s of feet long), called punch tape. Each instruction was a series of holes punched in the tape by a separate typewriter like machine, several of which were located in a room adjacent to the computer room. The extra air conditioning, required by the computer, kept the computer room so cold you couldn’t stay in there without a coat. Every detail of data flow, every step in program logic, naming and assigning address locations, managing memory allocation, and handling input-output actions had to be conceived and programmed for each problem.
The concept of an operating system had not yet evolved; the programmer would have hands-on possession of the machine for a specified period of time. At the end of the assigned time slot, a printout (memory dump) would be the basis for examination of the program's behavior or results. If the run crashed, you could take a Polaroid picture of the array of lights on the console for further analysis. The most common problem was the dreaded do-loop which could easily get you in a loop that would eat up all your allotted time without and results. You would then have to punch a new tape to correct the program and get back in queue with the hundreds of other people trying to run their programs. This would often take 3-4 days. Can you imagine that when you are up against a deadline.
Moreover, the only math function was an add (if you wanted to subtract your changed the sign and added) and it only handled binary numbers. So everything had to be converted from decimal to binary, manipulated using Boolean algebra and converted back to decimal. Keeping track of where to place the decimal point was another common source for error. Can you imagine doing something like integral calculus? We did it.
You want to guess why I didn’t become a programmer.
And yes, I am related to Dave and Hudson and I am very proud of both of them.
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