Twenty-two years ago I was introduced to programming by a friend in middle school. I was working on a video project and my friend thought it would be cool to display scrolling credits at the end of the video.
I thought to myself, “this guy is going way over the top, we don’t have time for that!” Then he told me he could write a program on his home computer to run the credits, and all we’d have to do is video tape the monitor.
I was instantly intrigued at the idea. He wrote about a dozen lines of BASIC and showed me the code. Boom, I became an amateur programmer that very moment.
For a long time though, the output of my little “scripts” was limited to the DOS console, my code was procedural and variable scoping wasn’t really an issue.
When I think about young programmers starting out with JavaScript today, what a different experience. An understanding of your development environment, runtime environment, variable scoping and object-oriented development almost seem like prerequisites even at the most basic introductory level.
When I was browsing Amazon yesterday, I came across this book.
It’s really what prompted me to write this quick post on my early development days. I think that any introductory programming book these days has a few more challenges than in the past.
It would be interesting to compare a modern “kids” introductory programming book of today from one written 20 years ago.