The Age of Punch Cards
I occasionally went to my dad’s job at night when I was younger. The space – something like 1500 square feet – was filled with cabinets that housed computers. He could only run the programs at night, when the rest of the plant was closed, which brings us to the early 1970s.
He used to run that stack of punch cards, but from what I remember, he would put them into a smaller computer to prepare the work for the mainframes. Who knows whether I remember things correctly—I was a kid.
Programming as a Kid
My introduction to computer programming was rather different. I would purchase a magazine and find pages of code that I could type into my computer (a personal computer running BASIC) and then execute right in the middle, or the centerfold, if you will.
The computer would indicate the line that was incorrect if you made a typing error. An error stating, “IF without END IF on Line 120,” would appear. That was, in my dad’s opinion, cheating.
This was “interactive” coding, but what kind was it? It not only indicates when you make a mistake, but also where.
It seems that his punch card programming forced him to diagnose and correct his own errors.
Programming Today
I experimented with something new at begin.com tonight.
Although it seemed fascinating (for creating serverless applications that might be quickly deployed to AWS), I still need to install a few prerequisites, so I can’t tell you much about it at this time.
- First I needed to install Node.
- Then I needed to install Deno.
- But I had a small problem with that, so I had to fix some permissions.
- Then I had to install Git.
- Then use npm to install Architect Command Line Interface (CLI).
- But I had some issue there. Some libraries needed to be updated.
- Then I went to install the AWS CLI interface but my Python was outdated.
I stopped there to write my daily post.
And I came to a realisation.
Things Sure Have Changed
In the world of my dad’s programming, you wrote code and had to debug any errors on your own.
When I first started programming, you created code and were told where and what kind of error you were making.
When my child first started programming, you could write or run code that you could get from the internet (which has a tonne of excellent documentation). If there was an error, you could look up the error (such as libraries that needed updates or different permissions) and find the code that needed to be run to fix it.
In other words, there’s absolutely nothing prohibiting you from attempting new things.
Thus, my message to you today is to Keep learning and Keep trying.
