4 ms·

Could you elaborate on how you came to be programming in C/C++ for 7 or 8 years before encountering a spreadsheet? That seems an unusual path even back in the 9

Could you elaborate on how you came to be programming in C/C++ for 7 or 8 years before encountering a spreadsheet? That seems an unusual path even back in the 90s.

zackmorris 8y ago
Ya I picked up my first programming book when I was 12, then started with HyperCard and Visual Interactive Programming (VIP) on the Mac Plus with my friend (another guy named Zack): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard http://mstay.com/images/screens/vpc1.gif http://mstay.com/images/screens/vpc1.gif So thought of code as a big flowchart where you fill in the boxes with business logic. Transitioned to C within a year or two and got incredibly deep into assembly language and low level code for blitters back in the 486 era when DOOM came out. Unfortunately moderately priced Macs were an order of magnitude too slow to play fullscreen scrolling games at 640x480x8 resolution until the 60 MHz PowerPC came out in the mid 90s. So never made any real money on Mac shareware games, but I digress. The Mac had an informal programming environment (no console or office suite with standardized inter-application communication) and I hadn't seen MS Access or FileMaker yet, or spreadsheets. When I first encountered them for writing reports in college and it finally clicked for me that code didn't have to be run imperatively, it was devastating in a way. But I made a full recovery in the early 2000s when PHP/MySQL got popular and I was able to get back into rapid application development with ORMs. I feel like the world is about ready to make the jump from hands-on tools like Laravel to WYSIWYG tools like Wix. Most of the attempts I've tried are frankly terrible, but I'm optimistic.
- scroot 8y ago
  If you compare the ease of "authoring" in the top hypermedia environment of its day (Hypercard) with doing the same today (the web) it's plain as day that things have regressed. Here is a straight up comparison someone made if anyone is interested: https://twitter.com/ecgade/status/1029795513514774529 https://twitter.com/ecgade/status/1029795513514774529

Could you elaborate on how you came to be programming in C/C++ for 7 or 8 years before encountering a spreadsheet? That seems an unusual path even back in the 90s.

zackmorris 8y ago

Ya I picked up my first programming book when I was 12, then started with HyperCard and Visual Interactive Programming (VIP) on the Mac Plus with my friend (another guy named Zack): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard http://mstay.com/images/screens/vpc1.gif http://mstay.com/images/screens/vpc1.gif So thought of code as a big flowchart where you fill in the boxes with business logic. Transitioned to C within a year or two and got incredibly deep into assembly language and low level code for blitters back in the 486 era when DOOM came out. Unfortunately moderately priced Macs were an order of magnitude too slow to play fullscreen scrolling games at 640x480x8 resolution until the 60 MHz PowerPC came out in the mid 90s. So never made any real money on Mac shareware games, but I digress. The Mac had an informal programming environment (no console or office suite with standardized inter-application communication) and I hadn't seen MS Access or FileMaker yet, or spreadsheets. When I first encountered them for writing reports in college and it finally clicked for me that code didn't have to be run imperatively, it was devastating in a way. But I made a full recovery in the early 2000s when PHP/MySQL got popular and I was able to get back into rapid application development with ORMs. I feel like the world is about ready to make the jump from hands-on tools like Laravel to WYSIWYG tools like Wix. Most of the attempts I've tried are frankly terrible, but I'm optimistic.

scroot 8y ago
If you compare the ease of "authoring" in the top hypermedia environment of its day (Hypercard) with doing the same today (the web) it's plain as day that things have regressed. Here is a straight up comparison someone made if anyone is interested: https://twitter.com/ecgade/status/1029795513514774529 https://twitter.com/ecgade/status/1029795513514774529