Notes From An Old Programmer
An Opinionated Old Programmer
When I was 12, I told my family that I wanted to write and be a computer programmer when I grew up.
Well, two out of three ain't bad.
So the name of this substack is Old Programmer's Notes, which makes a certain amount of sense: I am old, and a programmer. I've been programming for money since 1 November 1969. Now, I hasten to mention I was 14 years old at the time. It was on an IBM System/3 model 10 with an astonishing 8 kilobytes of memory, punched cards and a chain line printer that could print a wondrous 100 lines per minute.
Have no doubt that I will tell war stories, but for now it's enough to say that there are musical birthday cards on the market with bigger computers than that.
In graduate school (Duke, MSCS 1988, ABD I think 1991, ABD again UNC-Chapel Hill 1992 and there's a story that goes with that I tell you what) I discovered that teaching is my drug of choice. You can expect a lot of content here to be tutorial in nature, with occasional side rants about how education is commonly done in the United States.
Some of that will be a series of articles "What Your Professors Didn't Tell you."
For quite a number of years, I've been tutoring and mentoring programming and computer science students on the Wyzant platform.
I notice more and more often that I'm helping students not with their specific assignment, but with really basic and important concepts that I think professors just figure students will grasp by osmosis.
Worse, sometimes I suspect their professors don't actually know or really understand the concepts. These are things like how a program's source code, the actual program text, becomes that thing that makes the computer actually do something. The first of those, "What Your Professors Didn't Tell You About C Programming," will be coming up in a couple of days.
Now for some little policy details.
First of all, I have enabled paid subscriptions on Old Programmer's Notes. Like my other Substack, The Stars Our Destination, I am very pleased and grateful for any paid subscriptions that come in. But for now and the foreseeable future, all the content here will be available to both paid and free subscribers. No paywall.
So that's my story. I hope you have as much fun with it as I do.
The problem with computers is they only do what they are told to do. Unfortunately, what they are told to do is not necessarily what you want them to do.
Want to become so rich that you make Elon look like a pauper. Invent a computer that does what you want it to do, not what you tell it to do.
I bought a TRS-80 when I was 15. It had 4k RAM. For another $100 I upgraded to 16k. I ended up with a 30+ year career in IT and retired at 55. I was in Senior Management but still coding. Coding was always easy, but management was just a big pain in the butt. That said, I would do it all over again.