To Learn A Language (Part 1)

The first language I learned was UniComal. I'm not sure why the school decided that in 1997 this was the best choice to introduce a generation of kids to the wonders of programming. I'm going to assume it was some kind of budget issue combined with the fact that all the computing teachers were over 50. I don't remember writing any code, but apparently it was one of these language -

10 PAGE
20 FOR number:= 1 TO 10 DO
30  PRINT "HELLO, WORLD!"
40 ENDFOR
50 END " "

And if my memories are correct, the kind of things we ended up creating looked kind of like this??

So not really setting the world alight.

Next step, once we elected to continue on with computing for to start learning Visual Basic. I'm not exactly sure what version we were working on, I'm pretty sure it wasn't VB6, but who knows. This was my first taste of real programming and I remember enjoying it, although again, we weren't really learning anything useful. I think this is what the final project was -

 

It's possible the whole Scottish computer science secondary school curriculum runs on being able to code Hangman. Anyway, I continued on to my final year in computing, until it became all about requirements specifications and no actual coding. I figured this is what programming in college would be like (I was very wrong), so I stopped programming altogether.

I dabbled over the years in VB6 and some C++ (also some PLC work, but I don't think that truly counts), but I didn't restart programming in full again until I was about 25 and picked up Java.

Java was unlike all the other programming languages I'd used so far. Looking back at VB6 now, I see it's probably not all that different, but when I started learning Java, it felt like a different world, one full of curly brackets and semicolons. That was before I even discovered Object Oriented Programming. Luckily I had a good book to see me through. I tried a few of them, but the one that really stuck was Heads First Java. 

If you are interested in Java, I really recommend it, they break everything down into little sections and show you multiple ways of looking at the same problem. Plus there are little projects at the end of each chapter to make things stick.

While I understood Java pretty well I was a little worried that I might be missing some style things, seeing as I'd only learned from one book, so I decided to follow it up with a free online programming course. Stanford's Programming Methodology (introduction to computer science). It was awesome, I felt like I was learning a little bit of new stuff while also recognizing a lot of general principles, it really helped reinforce everything, plus the Professor, Mehran Sahami was great (sadly I'd say he was better than all of my Professors in College).

When I started learning Java it was always in the goal of being able to write my own app. I'd learned a little about Android, and always thought it'd be fun to write something. I had no idea what, or how long it would take, but I knew I couldn't do it without Java.

Anyway, this has already become much longer than I'd originally planned, so I'll stop here and resume another day. If I have any readers yet, I hope you found this interesting.