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by stusmith1977
4895 days ago
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I'd add one more thing to this article: don't throw these projects away, even if they seem failed/doomed/incomplete. Store them somewhere. Back them up. Whatever. You might need them. Back when I was a teenager, I wanted to write an art package for an obscure computer (Acorn Archimedes). I wrote the first version in BASIC, then decided to re-do it in assembler. The assembler I first used couldn't cope with the size of the project in the end, so I wrote my own assembler; at that point I discovered C, so wrote it in that. Unfortunately the C compiler I used was so full of bugs I decided to port LCC to produce ARM assembler, but then I needed a linker, so I wrote that as well. Got it all working lovely to the point where it could compile itself. At university I figured Intel PCs were more useful than my obscure computer so... I forgot about it. Lost it. And to this day, I can't help but wish I still had it... I had written, and lost, a complete C development system, faster than any of the other compilers/linkers I tried, small footprint (it had to fit in a machine with 4Mb RAM), and ARM chips are now everywhere. Damnit! So please... save your work. |
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Sir, you have one very well-shaved yak there [1]. Excelsior!
In other news, I sometimes see people bemoaning losing the "easy programming" that the era putatively had. I sometimes wonder if time has simply faded the scars of a world in which that's the sort of thing that might realistically happen. The era made some moderately difficult things easy (people mostly seem to miss the ability to slam pixels on the screen), and everything else really, really freaking hard, including many things we'd call easy today.
[1]: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html