4 ms·

I still remember as a kid back in the 80s when a friend and I were making BASIC games on our Tandy 1000s with just the reference manual that came with the compu

I still remember as a kid back in the 80s when a friend and I were making BASIC games on our Tandy 1000s with just the reference manual that came with the computer, and he was trying to explain to me what a FOR loop was, and I was not getting it. "Why would you want to do the same thing twice?" Just this morning my own 10-year-old was looking over my shoulder while I was debugging some C, and I explained for loops to him. Since he plays violin I said it was like a repeat in music, and he seemed to grok that right away. My other memory of those days is, after years of dismissing GOSUB as useless ("Why would I want to go back to the same place I just left?"), finally having a flash of enlightenment and getting the point. It's a function call! (Not that I knew what those were....) Sorry this has nothing to do with the wiki page. :-) Except maybe that to at least one kid loopy programming was unnatural.

cdrini 7y ago
Haha, you're not alone. I remember when I first learned programming, loops me a while to get. Can't remember why, just remember the confusion :P Now if I'm teaching someone, I like to explain loops like going through a stack of books. You have a stack of books, and you go through each one and do something with it.
tluyben2 7y ago
Ha! Yes, I only had the reference manual and some (published by photocopying matrix printed writing) magazines to work with begin 80s as a kid and I remember making goto’s jump forward and then when done backward; some older guy at a meetup (I was the youngest for many years there) told me to check out gosub; that suddenly clicked after that. At first I thought they were just inconvenient goto’s. I guess my relationship between that time and j/k is that I really like the concept of just needing a (printed!) reference manual and being able to do everything you need. It is so liberating (for me anyway); it is also the reason why I like embedded asm/c programming: mostly I need nothing but the reference manual (and after all these years, not that even). To me it makes other types of work (web frontend/backend or native apps) with all their (unstable) libs tedious to work with; I am good at those (esp native apps) but I don’t really enjoy it as much.

cdrini 7y ago

Haha, you're not alone. I remember when I first learned programming, loops me a while to get. Can't remember why, just remember the confusion :P Now if I'm teaching someone, I like to explain loops like going through a stack of books. You have a stack of books, and you go through each one and do something with it.

tluyben2 7y ago

Ha! Yes, I only had the reference manual and some (published by photocopying matrix printed writing) magazines to work with begin 80s as a kid and I remember making goto’s jump forward and then when done backward; some older guy at a meetup (I was the youngest for many years there) told me to check out gosub; that suddenly clicked after that. At first I thought they were just inconvenient goto’s. I guess my relationship between that time and j/k is that I really like the concept of just needing a (printed!) reference manual and being able to do everything you need. It is so liberating (for me anyway); it is also the reason why I like embedded asm/c programming: mostly I need nothing but the reference manual (and after all these years, not that even). To me it makes other types of work (web frontend/backend or native apps) with all their (unstable) libs tedious to work with; I am good at those (esp native apps) but I don’t really enjoy it as much.