In short, I always liked programming, but I never considered it as my main profession. There was a lack of desire and opportunities for deep immersion in the subject.
Now this is my tool for automating my activities. In fact - a hobby, practically - an opportunity to do something else, in addition to the main job, which has nothing to do with programming.
It all started with the exhibition "Informatics in the life of the United States." I didn’t even go to it, I just received a booklet and a badge from my cousin, and that’s it. That was enough for me.
In the library, where I took a variety of technical literature, a well-known librarian, in response to my question “something about computers,” showed an almost children's book about BASIC programming. I saw the lines:
LET A = 5 LET B = 10 LET C = A + B PRINT C
and got...
I read the book to the end, and "programmed" in a notebook without ceasing. Fortunately, in the local house of pioneers and schoolchildren, where I went to the radio circle, a computer circle was opened, where I immediately transferred. Let it be Spectrums, but it was what we needed: after all, I could finally write and check real programs.
Unlike Linus Torvalds, I did not get into programming with codes and stayed on BASIC for a long time.
When the first 286 computers appeared at school, I was almost not afraid of this technology and understood the simple possibilities of DOS and Norton Commander a little faster than my peers.
Mom's friend, having learned that I was fond of programming, advised me to go to a "knowledgeable person." I went. This is how I first saw C code. After BASIC it was enlightenment. I read Kernighan and Ritchie's book from cover to cover, but remained somewhat perplexed.
At the institute I easily mastered C and Fortran.
In the third year we had the discipline "Computer-aided design systems (CAD)". That's where I had a chance to program! And not just anything, but calculations of parts of devices and machines with the generation of drawings for AutoCAD. Just writing a library for generating DXF files was worth something ... And all this in C.
On his own initiative, looking for additional opportunities and programming, he poked his head into the department of microelectronics, where they programmed FPGAs on VHDL. Didn't succeed. It all seemed very boring.
After graduation, I switched to web design for a while. I just then learned about the HTML language ... Later, the passion for the web led to JavaScript. And here my brain ran into a misunderstanding of the concept of OOP. Well, none. I got frustrated and switched to PHP. Not for long, until then, until he again ran into an object-oriented wall.
Then for some time I had no time for programming.
I returned to him again already at the current place of work. While again in the vein of the web, forgetting about the dead end of the OOP, which was not slow to remind of itself. And I decided it was time to take up C++. Next, the Qt framework pulled itself up, because I wanted visual interfaces and didn’t want C #, acquaintance with which left a painful impression.
I have lived like this ever since, with two thick reference books on the language at hand.
