[Argh. Yesterday's Mozilla snapshot just crashed on me,
and I was well into constructing a diary entry and a reply
for an article. *sigh*]
Since some people were apparently offended
that I "requested" Master certification, I have re-certified
myself as "Journeyer". I suppose that's a better balance
anyway. I believe my computer skills are strong enough in
general to justify a "Master" designation, regarding that
metric. However, my visible contributions to free software
have been minimal as yet, as I noted as much in my first
diary entry. By that scale, I might be an "Apprentice". So
I guess "Journeyer" is a reasonable compromise. At any
rate, I never requested anything.
I have been serious about programming for over 20 years,
since at least sixth grade. (I had more casual exposure to
computers and programming for several years prior to that as
well.) Back then, I used BASIC as my primary programming
language, since there were few other options available to
me. (At that time, on a minicomputer at a nearby high
school; I took a programming class that year for access to a
computer, not to learn anything new.) By seventh or eighth
grade, I was also working with Z-80 assembly language on the
TRS-80's the school had.
In ninth grade, I also started using BASIC, Pascal and TECO
on the RSTS/E system available at the high school, which was
a PDP-11 (I think) that was owned by the town. I literally
learned the Pascal language (including the use of structures
and pointers) in one week by reading a textbook
cover-to-cover in ninth grade. While I continued to use
BASIC through the rest of high school (it was the most
suitable language available for the platforms I was using),
I much preferred the power and cleaner expressiveness of
Pascal over BASIC.
TECO was a strange text editor and an even stranger
programming language. It was psychotic but an
interesting challenge in its own way. I've still got a
printout of the most interesting TECO program I ever wrote,
which renumbered BASIC programs (line numbers and references
to them, including ON...GOTO and ON...GOSUB); it's about
half a page of code printed, and it's dated May 1984 or
so. One of these days, I'd like to scan in this TECO code
and put the image on my homepage. I might even deconstruct
it in an HTML page to show how it did what it did, but it
would take a lot of analysis after so many years. Maybe
when I find some time to waste on it...
Sometime early in high school, I got an Atari 800 and
learned Atari BASIC and 6502 assembly language. My first
exposure to the C language was "Lightspeed C" for the Atari
800, but it was a very limited environment. (I bought the
K&R book around that time to learn what the real C
language was like.) Although I didn't own an Apple ][,
friends did, and later the school, so I did a fair bit of
programming Apple BASIC also. I even had some exposure to
QNX and Altos UNIX during high school, as well as dBase and
the Clipper compiler. (I even played with LOGO at one
point, which seemed useless but amusing.)
To give you an idea of the depth of my interest in
computers, I purchased a copy of the
"Dragon" book even before I graduated high school,
because I was interested in learning about compiler design.
My computing life was completely overhauled in the fall of
1987 when I went to college at Rensselaer. That's when I
got introduced to SunOS and the Internet. I immediately
stopped programming in any dialect of BASIC and never looked
back. C became my preferred programming language, and UNIX
my preferred operating system. (BSD flavors such as SunOS
3/4 in particular.)
Unfortunately, I'm out of time at the moment, so I'll have
to continue this story later...
