When I saw this comic a couple weeks ago, it hit a chord just right with me.
Except of course it was PHP, and grade 9. The funny thing was, I started writing
programs way back when I was in grade 5. I tried to start learning development
when I was in grade 3. Let me tell you, there are certain subtleties to programming
that don’t quite become apparent to a 9 year old.
10 PRINT “Steve is Awesome!”
20 GOTO 10
While QBasic was fun to play with, I gave up on that when I found a book on Visual
Basic in Grade 5. I vaguely remember it being Visual Basic 5 too. I could
be wrong. It was a little more than 10 years ago – you do the math. The
problem I found with VB was that it didn’t feel all that intuitive from a language
perspective to me. I could never find it to flow properly. But at the
time, that’s all I had to go on. So I gave up on development for a while and
tried my hand at HTML. Once again, certain things just aren’t apparent at certain
ages. When I first tried HTML, I started in notepad. Shortly thereafter
I ended in notepad. Maybe sports would be more fun? Nah… Enter FrontPage
a few months later.
After finally getting the hang of FrontPage, I built some amazing (read: ugly) sites.
All-in-all they weren’t bad for an 11 year old.
Once middle school rolled around, I tried my hand at the other sciences and found
out I really enjoyed biology. Being the semi-OCD-like person I am, I put all
my attention into biology and medicine, with a curiosity for chemistry. I knew way too
much for my own good.
Now I have to mention that all of this is taking place in beautiful Southern California.
I was born and raised there for 14 years. At the end of Grade 8, my parents
decided to move to Canada. Don’t ask - long story. And at that time, I
was still into the life sciences. In my next
post, I’ll continue on with my story.