@nixCraft I don't know what fraction of programmers do it because it is fun, but it certainly has been true for me since day one. And I suspect it's true for the really good ones.
I'm retired and I still do some programming every day.
@paul @AlgoCompSynth @nixCraft me too.
There have been times where it was not fun but that was not because programming is not fun but rather because I was in a bad way at the time.
But I have always returned to it. I don’t see that changing.
I am sure some people do it for other reasons but I think they are missing the point made here. But who knows. Maybe they tried it and didn’t like it. It’s not for everyone.
@xexyl @paul @nixCraft I was 19, a senior in college and not quite sure what I wanted to do. My degree was in math but I didn't want to go on to grad school and I didn't want to teach.
I took an assembly language programming course and by the first project I knew that was what I wanted to do! It just came naturally to me and I was good at it - better than anything else I ever tried.
@AlgoCompSynth @paul @nixCraft I loved asm. In school I was taking a C++ course but on my free time I was doing low level asm (like direct I/O). The course was boring me to tears. I have always loved C though but I am self taught. If you have what it takes you don’t need to be taught it.
But for me it is a hobby. I suspect it would be different for me if it was a job. Fortunately I have the choice.
@AlgoCompSynth @paul @nixCraft I taught myself asm too. Never had to use FORTRAN and I am thankful for that.
I am perhaps younger than you but not sure. I am 42. Well I must go. Good day! Thanks for the dialogue!
@paul @AlgoCompSynth @nixCraft I have heavily modified a scripting language in the MUD I am part of. Most of it was heavily modified if not entirely rewritten.
We have things there that I found out years later that World of Warcraft has. That MUD gave me so much joy and friends and my experience there is how I first got really into C. That was over two decades ago now. Before that I liked it a lot but wasn’t using it as much.
@paul @AlgoCompSynth @nixCraft in those days I used SunOS/Solaris and FreeBSD but I changed the BSD box to Linux because its libc is so vastly superior. We had to put a lot of conditionals and hacks just to get it to work okay or even compile. One of the things I am most proud of there is the linked list and pointer validity tracking system. That solved a huge problem.
But nowadays most of my programming is related to the IOCCC. Have to go now!
nixCraft 🐧
AlgoCompSynth by znmeb 🇺🇦
Paul.
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