I’m not the sort to dwell on my past, at least not most of the time. But recently I’ve thought a bit about where some of my current software development interests come from. I wrote a few of these “origins” down and thought some of them might be interesting enough to share.
My first real exposure to a computer was in the late 1970s, at the Radio Shack located in the local mall. A friend and I would hang around and bang some Basic code into a TRS-80 until we were asked to leave by the staff (usually only when they got a real customer, which was rare, and they were very good about letting us hang out otherwise).
We had bought one of those books containing complete program listings. When entered properly, the three-or-so-page programs allowed us to run cheesy little text-based games. What that meant is that I wasn’t really doing much programming–I was only typing code directly from the book into the trash80, not knowing half of what was going on. I had a small grasp of what programming was all about, but wasn’t daring enough to do much with it on my own (save for a little “guess the number from 1 through 10” application). The code in the books was so daunting–several pages of convoluted code with inscrutable variable names and lots of gotos.
Over time, I remember thinking, “why are things so convoluted?” and figuring there had to be a better way. I would take some of the programs and make small changes to them, such as renaming variables, in order to make them more comprehensible. It’s a practice I continued throughout my career, even when I knew I’d be the only one who would probably ever look at the code. To this day, I still refactor code in this manner as my first approach to better understanding unfamiliar code.
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