hello world

A long time ago in a land far away I studied Computer Science at  university. The lecturers pretty much expected you to simply sit down with a textbook and teach yourself with some direction from lectures. You wrestled with things like C++ pointers, memory management and recursion. The internet existed but it was dial-up, expensive and a hassle. All the bootcamps, tutorials and YouTube videos weren’t available. It was just you and the book and a cup of coffee.

You coded in Vi or Emacs and compiled on the command line. There were times you could spend ages banging your head on the desk trying to find a bug that in the end was just a spelling mistake. It wasn’t an efficient or productive process but it really taught you to be careful and disciplined and to understand every aspect of what you were doing.

I’ll never forget the first program I wrote. It went something like this:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
     printf("hello, world\n");
     return 0;
}

Compiled and run to print “hello, world”. It was a joyful thing to behold. This is a quest to rediscover the essence of coding away from the hyper-productive IDEs, AI-generated code, frameworks and all the rest. Just the joyful essence of code.