20 years of programming

The first time I wrote some gibberish on a computer, compiled it and run it was over 20 years ago. In this post I want to tell you the story of how it all started, and how it continued.

It started with BASIC

It was the end of 2005, I was 11 years old. A friend of mine shared with me this strange program that let you create other programs.

This program was called DarkBASIC. It was an IDE with its own language and game development framework. This framework made it quite easy to load pictures, sound and even 3D models, but we did not go much further than making a couple of short text adventure games, and other less useful programs.

Although I guess one of these “less useful” programs was somewhat interesting, since it ultimately made me learn a proper programming language. I forgot what exactly this program did, but at some point you could input a password. Later in the execution, if you typed this password wrong, it would delete the C:\Windows folder from your PC. And sure enough, I tried it and got the password wrong on the very first try.

Ah, those were days. My only complaint about DarkBASIC is that it bundled a lot of stuff when it built your code into an executable, so that even the most minimal program would result in a huge 1.5Mb binary. Just large enough not to fit in a floppy disk. So it was kinda hard to share programs with my friends.

Anyways, my parents were not happy with my amazing Windows-erasing program, as we had to pay someone to fix the family PC. But my mom offered me a deal: if I promised never to make harmful software again, she would buy me a book to learn a real programming language. In case you did not know, in 2005 you learnt programming languages by reading books.

The Java phase

According to the TIOBE index, Java was the most popular programming language in 2006, and so it was chosen as my first real programming language.

The book explained how to write, compile and run code the proper way: no fancy IDE, just notepad and command-line tools. It took me days, if not weeks to figure out how to add javac and java to the Windows $PATH, but in the end I made it and I could finally run my Hello World. A couple of years later I would switch to Linux, where all of this is trivial; to this day I still wonder why some programmers choose to use Windows.

This pocket book, and another one that I bought soon afterwards, explained many topics, including object-oriented programming and how to make GUI applications. I don’t think I got OOP at the time - it was meant to solve problems I had never encountered. Now that I have been a professional software developer for a few years, I don’t think I get it either - it still does not solve any problem I have encountered; if anything, it creates a few more.

I managed to recover some of the programs I wrote between 2006 and 2010 in a git repository. The most successful one is JBriscola, a single-player game of briscola with a decent AI. It is actually quite fun to play, and a few of my friends played it regularly back then. It’s so cool that they still run on a modern Java runtime - good job, Java! Great backwards compatibility.

At some point in 2009 or so I bought a third, more advanced Java book. My goal at the time was learning how to make more complex GUI applications - something I don’t find particularly enjoyable nowadays, but at the time I was having a lot of fun with it. But I never read past the first half of this book, because my focus shifted to programming challenges.

Competitive programming

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but in 2010, in my second year of high school, I qualified for the regional phase of the national competitive programming circuit. In school we were learning Pascal (for a grand total of 10 hours a year), but I thought that with Java knowledge it would have been better to pick up C or C++, the other two languages allowed in the contest. And so I did: I learnt just enough C to get by, and somehow I qualified for the Olimpiadi Italiane di Informatica - the national final.

Not only did I qualify, but I also did pretty well in it: I ended up in the top-half of the ranking. Considering my young age (the competition was open to students of all 5 years of high school, and I had just started my 3rd year) I was invited to take part in the IOI preparation stages. A new world opened up for me.

In these preparation stages, to which I was invited for three consecutive years, I learnt a lot about data structures, algorithms and computational complexity. I used C++, although it was very much “C with STL” - I dont think I wrote a class or even a struct at the time. But I did not care much: C++ was just a tool for a specific task, like Java and DarkBASIC were. The task was writing text adventures first, GUI programs later and it was now solving puzzles.

In 2012 I qualified for the IOI as a B-team member - the hosting country, which was Italy that year, was allowed to bring a second team who could compete without appearing in the official rankings. In the end that was a good call, as all the members of the A-team did better than me - my results were not amazing.

I enjoyed this part of my programming journey a lot. You may think that this cemented my passion for coding and turned me into a programmer. But somehow, it did the opposite.

The Math break

Solving programming puzzles made me enjoy problem-solving, logic reasoning and formal proofs more than coding. I was also enjoying Math contests during high school, and these two things made me realize I wanted to dive deeper into the theory, rather than just writing code. So I decided to sign up for a Mathematics program at University.

During my first year (2013-2014) I kept coding a little bit: I was solving problems on projecteuler.net, I learnt some J (an ASCII-based APL clone), I started porting JBriscola to Scala - I wonder if I still have that code somewhere. I even looked into Rust and Go, two languages that had just been announced. But I lacked the motivation for starting a new project, and soon I would drop all these new languages - except J, I still use it as a fancy desktop calculator from time to time.

For a while I tried to follow also my passion for computer science by taking elective courses in OOP, Algorithms, and Functional Programming. But it was not easy to find a study program that combined the two subjects in way I liked. I ended up signing up for a pure Math master: the ALGANT program.

Between 2015 and 2018 I did not write much code outside of the little that was needed for my studies. As a noteworthy exception, I did take part in the North-West Europe regional phase of the ACM ICPC, a programming contest for university students. But even then, I put very little effort into practicing for it - I just had other priorities at the time.

Back at it

After graduating, I doubled down on Math and decided to get a PhD. But at the beginning of my PhD, in 2019, I wrote some code for work: my supervisor and a colleague of mine had devised an algorithm to compute the degrees of certain field extensions, and I implemented it.

I don’t know if this is what got me back into coding for fun, or if it was just a matter of time, but by the end of 2019 I was already thinking about writing a Rubik’s cube solver. 6 years and two rewrites later, I am still working on this project, which became a great sandbox for learning new topics and a good source of inspiration for blog posts.

Still during my PhD, COVID hit. Forced to spend long hours alone in my one-room apartment, I had more time to code and tinker with Linux and OpenBSD. A couple of years later I started this blog. As I was now approaching the end of my PhD, I had to decide if I wanted to continue in academia or do something else.

And I chose to do something else: I chose to become a software developer.

Now it’s (not just) my job

When I applied for jobs as a software engineer, I thought there was a chance I could get fed up with programming and quit it as a hobby. After all, I liked Math, but when I was a PhD student I did not do much of it in my weekend or my free time.

But coding was different. I can’t seem to get tired of it nowadays. If during the week I write C# for a living, in the weekend I work on my C projects or hack on shell scripts. If at day I work with Python, at night I solve puzzles in C++ or play around with Hare. When I had a few idle months between projects, I learnt some Rust, some QT and ported my C program to WebAssembly. I listen to programming talks and podcasts while I cook and do the dishes.

No, I did not get tired of programming. Maybe I never will.