Programming For Enquiring Minds
You need to be anal retentive with the patience of a saint and a strong sense of humour
Many, many years ago I wrote my very first, and my very last, computer programme. I had bought myself an Atari 1040st for home recording and word processing purposes as I was an aspiring composer (as opposed to an actual one, which is what I am these days) and as a professional writer, which I really was and I still am.
The 1040 came bundled with a copy of Basic. I was highly excited at the prospect of being a madcap computer programmer, especially as I had met one or two programmers who seemed pretty cool guys and earned oodles of money, which at that time always turned me on, the money part that is.
So I ripped open the pack and got started. I spent an hour or more typing into the Atari lines and lines of code. I learnt to my cost that if you get one little full stop wrong you’re screwed. The programme simply won’t work. And it can take ages trying to track down the culprit. The words needle and haystack spring to mind.
Eventually I found the offending line of code and bingo, it worked. Time to test it out. Oh what a grave disappointment it was. What I got was a weedy monotone rendering of “Daisy, daisy give me your answer do.” That was it for me. I felt like I’d given so much for so little in return. To coin a phrase, I got very little bang for my buck.
The thing is, even today, programming languages are like a foreign language. I haven’t got a clue about Urdu nor Java or Python, but if I had to choose which to learn I think I would rather tackle Urdu.
I think you have to be of a certain type of personality to be a computer programmer. Being an anal-retentive is I think one of the first qualities you need to possess.
You also need to be an incredibly boring type of person, or rather one who is not easily bored by getting bogged down in bashing out lines and lines and lines of incomprehensible code only to get a duo-tone version of ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman.’
It would be better still if you were an automaton, totally devoid of any human feeling or desire for job satisfaction, not to mention virtually no capacity for a little joy of life and living.
I think the reason these guys still get oodles of money is nobody in their right mind would really want to spend the best days of their life trying to find the equivalent of a woman’s G spot, without anything like the tactile fun of it.
I would rather try to extract an elephants tooth going in at the rear end than attempt to write another computer programme.
I am philosophical about the matter. It’s not for me. I have come to the conclusion that I simply have not got the patience to ever get anywhere with it. I have in effect abandoned all hope of getting to grips with it. Forget the oodles of money, I would rather be poverty-stricken for the rest of my born days than to spend an entire day trying to hunt down a missing full stop just to get my computer to molest me with a painful monotone rendition of ‘It’s just an itsy bitsy teeny weenie yellow polka dot bikini.’ Such is the life of a self-contented under-performer.
