16 december 2020
Today is the day I first started learning programming in any capacity, 10 years ago. On 16th December, 2010, 9 year-old me found an old textbook which, of all languages, taught Ada:
Ada was, and still is, a strange language. Statements and declarations are very clearly separated, and the syntax is so old-timey; it even reminds me of COBOL in places.
I can tell you one thing, it scared 9 year-old me away from programming for the next 5 years, when I picked up Python at the age of 14. School taught us Pascal, which really did not help
my image of programming as being more complex than it needs to be, just because of silly decisions... In fact, when I picked up C++ later on (a bit before Python), I found myself typing
"if (condition) then" instead of "if (condition) {}" very, very often, purely because Ada was the thing I had first seen.
To be clear, I don't hate Ada as a programming language, but it's not a very clear beginning programming language for a 9 year-old, not as much as Python is... It's quite flexible,
and had I not put my bank on Rust as a low-level systems programming language, I can imagine a future where I'm using Ada instead.
Why do I remember all of this? Because, I guess, it made me who I am today. It did this in more than one way: it pushed me away from programming for a whole five years, thus prompting me to go for systems administration instead, and also sort-of repelled me from using obscure languages and then being unable to adapt. Hah!
With how things have been going, I'll definitely get back into programming as an art form these days. That is, if CS:GO doesn't take up all my time..
I just realised that when typing, my left hand is completely only using the index finger (and the little finger for Shift), while my right hand is using my thumb, index finger, middle finger, little finger and ring finger. I don't know why this is, but it does mean that if I type a word that's more on the right side of the keyboard, it's faster than anything on the left. But, the most common letters tend to be on the left... I don't know how to fix it, I already have 90-100 WPM the way things are. But, I can feel the strain from only using my index finger. I'll see what my options are.