This year it's:
- Fifty years since I first learned to program!
- Thirty years of programming Python!
- And In July, this blog topped one million views since its inception!
I first learned to program by crashing an after-school class I saw the private school geeks disappearing to from Central library in Nottingham. One of the Trent Polytechnic lecturers I now see sometimes on Computerphile - he mentioned how the council payed something towards the cost of the computer on the understanding that they have a class for students, but somehow only the guys from the fee paying Nottingham High School for Boys seemed to get the memo, hmm.
That was s long ago, Paper tape and teletypes.
Forward to 1995: A new job, amongst engineers where the few of them that could program, programmed in Perl. Perl was big within the chip design industry back then, but Aargh! I thought Perl was awful - for me it did not gel! I went looking for an alternative and found this little known language called Python.
The community on comp.lang.python seemed so nice, they valued readability and "One obvious way to do it" over Perls more than one way. I was hooked, and did my little bit of evangelizing. (OK, I was known as that Python guy - but they couldn't fault the code).
Was it eleven years ago that I started the blog? It has been one of two main places where I have shown my work - the other is on site rosettacode.org which, no doubt, has been scraped to death for AI's - it is one of the few places online showing different programming languages solving the same task. I wrote 199 of those RosettaCode tasks over the years, and many more of the examples solving those tasks; (mainly Python and Awk language examples). Most, if not all of those task descriptions were my own work - not copied off other sites - if there are similarities in text then they probably copied from me or the task is so simple that there is going to be convergence).
Lately, as you can tell from the pictures above, I have been dabbling in AI. AI is the future, but who knows how AI will affect that future? I am a programmer who can describe coding tasks to other people for them to complete the task. AI is an ever changing field, I think that I am learning to use it better, as it gets better too - I am both more and less precise in my prompting and finding out what the AI remembers and does best. I experiment with the amount of description in the code to cut and paste into new sessions to cut the mistakes and continue from a clean base. I experiment with coding from pseudo-code. I have found that some abilities are universal: when exploring the use of SQL - which I am a hunt-n-peck coder in, I can still spot redundancies "You recompute the first query as part of the second and the second as part of the third, can't you reuse prior results", lead to the AI introducing common table expressions I think it was, and telling me all about them.
I'm still scripting 😊
