What made you a programmer

What is that special mix of circumstances that made you start programming?

>>1
Liked writing scripts on my TI-83. Fucking horrible programming language though. Ever tried to display a formatted string on it? Don't.

>>2

haha, wow, you tied that? It doesn't a stack or global memory, just register like values that are named the letters of the alphabet. How did that go?

In the former Soviet Union, education and science were highly esteemed and even poor families were striving to seem "educated", trying to make their children smarter, there were constant pressure to improve one errors and failure was punished, sometimes physically.
There was actually a system which would make one sick of education, and it certainly was not effective for the masses of retards which were produced by schools, though there were a small elite which learned on their own, since books and libraries were cheap.
I can attribute everything only to myself and the idea of exploring the internal working of system, such as a computer from the ground up.
The first 286(there were cheap since the hardware was old at the time) which was loaded with MSDOS bundled with a couple of stacks of 5.25 floppies seemed deceptively simple, and i was set to improve it with batch files(which i found out first), discovering eventually how the programs are made(Quickbasic,Turbo pascal,Borland C) and making a couple of small programs in Basic.
I don't learn by the book, by a rigid system or some form of education, i prefer to explore things myself until i get a clear picture of the stuff.
So when i seen Qbasic failing to do something another program did, i've tried to deduce what that feature was made of and tried to replicate it with Qbasic, though this didn't work quite well for everything(like hardware access, since i didn't know anything about drivers/TSRs/interrupts beyond the basic idea of video modes).

I liked anime.

Autism

>>4
Autodidact learning is often an excellent form of education.

I also would add, a major point of interest then was "hacking" DOS games(which i was not very good at,until i moved to windows and later games such as starcraft) to cheat or glitch out the system. There was constant room for experiments.
You could change a couple of data files on the diskette or even alter the executable if you knew where the variables are stored.

Like >>2, I started programming on my TI (a 84+, because I'm not poor like him).
God the language (TI-BASIC) was awful. What made me start was the boring Maths lessons in high-school: programming was a way to spend time.
Snake, connect four, mastermind, minesweeper, checkers, and a text-based RPG.
I used lots of GOTO (and the program had to be parsed at runtime to find the corresponding label, so it hung for several seconds on big programs).

The only thing I never managed to do was making two calculators work over the link between them.

>>9

The only thing I never managed to do was making two calculators work over the link between them.

TI-8X satori

I tried to make a two player tank game using this, but it was so slow it wasn't even close to being usable. My friends thought it was funny.

>>4
How 286's existed in Soviet Union?

>>7

I became an autodidact in less than an hour. Ask me how.

>>9
84+
Looks like we have an underage poster here. Read the 4chan global rules and follow them, please!

>>11
Soviet Union ended when i was in third grade, but you could buy 286 even before that, if you knew the right people. There was a underground economy of computer parts, cartridges, diskettes and stuff.

>>14
even if we're talking about east germany here, i still strongly doubt that you could obtain a 286, because

+ robotron
+ stasi would have been on your ass way before you realized that you fucked up big time
+ robotron
+ >implying 286
+ robotron
+ there was no "underground economy of computerparts"
+ oh did i already mention that robotron created similar tools (infact, they had roughly 20 MSDOS clones)?
+ also stasi and lack of underground economy

make some sense, asshole

>>15
Not FV, but they did love to reverse engineer foreign chips in the SU. Maybe not economy, but not exactly lack of technology either.

>>15
You misunderstand it, i was using 286 in 1995-1996, five years after it ended.
The "underground economy" were people xchanging diskettes and cartridges mostly, and i don't know on period before the later 80's(and i wasn't that much involved).

The keyword here is "former Soviet Union".

>>18
The keyword is "your bring trolled".

Frozenvoid is east European?
Explains the horrible code and the low intelligence.

meant to post that here.
>Стоил он в конце восьмидесятых больше десяти тысяч рублей.
people were actually buying such expensive  shit.
http://mkt.izmuroma.ru/exponat_199.html
>Позже с массовым появлением из-за дальнего бугра "нормальной" техники - АТ-286, "Роботрон" не выдержал конкуренции и полностью исчез из быта советских технарей.
As expected.

The heating maintainer had me download VB6.

>>20
0/10 kill yourself americunt

>east germany
>holding onto their communism with robotic zeal
>forcing everyone to use Robotron
>stasi spies stealing disks
Such is life in soviet GDR.

>>4
I learned very much the same way, except I was living in western Canada. This was in the late 80s and early 90s, around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and the failed military coup.

I was drawn to spending a great deal of time learning about computing not due to the poor quality of public education, but rather because I was shy and had no friends.

Like you, I was learning using Quick Basic 4.5, Borland Turbo Pascal 6 and 7, and Borland Turbo C++ 3.0, in addition to x86 assembly language.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up with my old hardware, my parents donated it to a computer recycling place when I got my 386 and later 486.

My dad bought the family a commodore 64 when I was 6.

my mom took a programming course when i was 9. the institute lend her a zx spectrum.

I had too much free time on my hands.

http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/AiMind.html

took me over heart and soul, to create the True AI.

http://code.google.com/p/mindforth/wiki/AiHasBeenSolved

TRUE SOVIET PROGRAMMERS MAKE THEIR OWN SPECTRUMS FROM SCRATCH
http://zxbyte.ru/pentagon.htm

>21
Стоил он в конце восьмидесятых больше десяти тысяч рублей.
"It cost at the end of the (19)80's more than 9K rubles."
Wow! I can read that stuff! It looks just like Russian!
After I finish my German-language AI, I want to create
RuUm -- (Russki Ym) -- my Russian-language AI. I am thinking
of calling it "Dushka", for "little soul", which is also
a term of endearment in Russian. But -- one problem: How can
I get Win32Forth or MSIE JavaScript to display Cyrillic?

I picture myself a dark room. There is filthy CRT screen buzzing away its phoshors, and a fat neckbeard sitting next to it. There is collection of anal dildoes all around him and remains of pizzas and potato chip packs, underneath them is a "C++ for dummies" half-eaten by rats. He giggles like a little pig and types another "My Anus" post, while test-driving another dildo in his ass.

I have always wanted to be a girl, at least that is since puberty. But before Puberty, I, in common with all other lads of my age we were glad that we were not girls, as we considered them to be rather weak silly giggly creatures.

But after puberty, for me at least there was a complete reversal, I found that I desperately wanted to be a girl, I was bitterly disappointed that I had not been born female. What had I done wrong ? Was I being punished for something done in a previous life ?

There were a number of reasons why I wanted to be a girl. 1. They are much more attractive than boys. 2. They have lovely smooth skin. 3. They have beautiful hair. 4. Their complete overall body shape is far superior to ours. 5. Their clothing is far better than ours.

My number 1 fantasy was to wake up in the morning, and find that in the night my body had changed into that of silky smooth girl's body, and that I could now wear female clothing. I would have two lovely firm well rounded breasts, and down below I would have two smooth lips, instead of that male appendage hanging down between my legs.

In fact I would rather like the newfound need to have to sit down on the loo in order to relieve a full bladder.

This last requirement reminds me that at an early age I discovered my submissive nature. In fact whenever I saw an attractive teenage girl, every fiber of my being cried out, "Beat me, please beat me".

For some strange reason I cannot explain I wanted so much to suffer at the hands of the sex I so much wanted to be.

At school we used Logo, where you write simple commands to make a turtle draw lines on the screen. I found this fascinating even at an early age.

Later on, I wrote webpages using monstrosities of CSS and HTML.

Then I studied Computer Science formally, and reached the height of human achievement.

6th grade got a xanga, saw I could customize html, so learned html

and thought I'd like to see what I can do and learned java script so i could embed games from newgrounds on it, then I learned CSS because I wanted to make my own web page

then learned java in 9th grade and fucking hated it, so learned python. used those 2 till my freshman year in college where I learned sepples which is pretty good (better than java in my opinion) and then learned perl which I fell in love with

still don't do  many system or application programming... so really a novice in the programming languages i know

oh also dabbled in DB's so became a squall genie

CLOHE


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The reason I'm asking this question, is to see if anyone out there has had this happen to them. When I was growing up I never looked at men in a sexual way at all, but one day about 20yrs ago (41 now) while in college I was tired of jacking off the same old way, and thought of trying something new while jacking off this time. All my roommates were in class, so I had the apartment to myself, so I went into the refrigerator and got a carrot and slide it between my bunk bed frame & mattress leaving 3/4 of it hanging out over the edge of the bed. Then I got a little of lotion and got on my knee doggie style and started to jack off, at the same time sliding my asshole back slowly onto the carrot and letting it slide inside me. Well, to my complete shock & surprise the feel of the carrot up my ass and me stroking my cock was utter esctasy, and when I came, it was like Nigeria Falls of cum, it just kept shooting, and shooting gobbs of cum, then, it just dripped long, string like clear cum. I couldn't believe sex could feel so good, and I got scared. You all know why I'm sure, I didn't try doing this again for awhile because in the back of my mind, I knew if a carrot drove me crazy with estasy, my god, what would a warm fat cock, that I have no control over how hard, fast, and deep it could go into - just the thought of it made me hard and drip with pre-cum. I was so pissed with myself, because I experimented with that carrot, and now,I was looking at the prospect of actually taking it to the next step, and experiment with a man. I just wanted to see what it would be like, anyway it took me 7 long frustrating yrs after the carrot to get my first Fucking by a Man. And needless to say, that was it for me, I couldn't go back now, I had my first gay intercouse, and loved it beyond belief and it blew my mind. I had a girlfriend at the time, and shortly after that day, every time we had sex, I could only get hard if I thought about cock & balls, and I felt, I had no business fucking a woman now, because my sexual manhood had be taken by a man fucking up my ass and then cumming inside me. I surprising felt okay, with this feeling, almost proud in the fact of knowing a man has fucked me, and now my asshole has become a pussy. To make this long story short, it took another 8yrs of fight back and forth with "am I gay, Bi, or what", until last year 2000. I told myself, at the beginning of the year, that I would only have sex with men this year, and make a descion at the end of the year to see if this was just a fade and I just needed to get this out of my system. Well, Feb 5th, 2000, is the day I came to the self-realization I'm gay. Because, I met a wonderful gay man that was 54yrs old, well-hung Top with an 8 1/2" thick, cock and large balls over the internet on Yahoo. We met at a Motel 6 on a Saturday afternoon around 3pm, he fucked me none-stop, 4yrs, putting me into all types of sexual positions, penetrarting deeper than I've ever been before, and just bascially taught me what its really like to be a Bottom. Up until this time, it was sex on the run, nothing long or as intense as this. Oh, he never came once, and always stayed hard, we took about a 40 min. break after the frist 4hrs. then our last session was a 3hrs pound fest, each position he put me into he fucked me as hard as he could, and hearing his large balls slap up against my sweaty ass, and the pain/pleasure he was giving me I knew, for sure without a doubt, that Today this man has for sure fucked me into becoming a gay man. I love women, but I can never have sex with them, and don't have the desire.

So, if any of you have read this far, what do you think?

I know, that if I never had experimented with that carrot in college, I would be straight now. (Possibly)?

I know, that if I never had experimented with Lisp in college, I would be straight now. (Possibly)?