Preparing Myself to Learn Programming

My first exposure to any programming involved writing Batch scripts - think shell scripts for Windows.

The first time I used a computer was an IBM XT clone. It ran DOS.

I was 11 when I got my second computer, a nifty Windows 95 machine. I kept all of my games organized on that second computer. One day, I thought of making a number-based menu for my games using Batch scripts. That’s where it started.

Fast-forward a year or so, my parents wanted me to apply to the Saint Joseph School. I was in class 5 at that time. They bought me some computing studies books used at that school.

One of the books had some example QBasic programs at the end of it. That’s where I got my second dose of exposure and saw some “real” programs (in case you wouldn’t call writing Batch scripts programming).

A few years later, my father bought Orko, a Bengali IME software developed by Daffodil Software Ltd. It was like Avro (the one you use to type Bengali phonetically). I wanted to build something like Orko in Visual Basic / Visual Basic .NET. That’s where I got exposure to reading documentation, mostly around Win32 and Windows API.

And then, some years later, I entered university.

Now dig this: the first time I learnt that you could sort an array without needing multiple arrays and without doing it at O(N^2) was during my CSE105 classes.

That’s when I realized that all these years, I was only preparing myself to learn to program.

This post is 7th of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.

This post is 7th of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.