The Minority Report

While I wanted to write a huge beginning post explaining the blog and what I hoped to accomplish, plus give a shout out to Gina Trapini at Lifehacker, the Waiter at WaiterRant and many others for inspiring me to want to have a “real” blog, I just can’t seem to pull the trigger.  So without much ado, here is my first post on a subject near and dear to my heart…programming.

Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror posts today about the differences between programming languages and scripting languages.  it’s a long article and very worth reading.

Coding Horror: A Scripter at Heart

What’s the difference between a programming language and a scripting language? Is there even a difference at all? Larry Wall’s epic Programming is Hard, Let’s Go Scripting attempts to survey the scripting landscape and identify commonalities.

Look familiar??

In fact, my first programming experiences didn’t begin with a compile and link cycle. They began something like this:

I think it’s funny how his experiences mirror my own. I started out on the Apple IIe with the same prompts after playing around at Sears with the Commodore 64′s and putting them into the endless “Hello World” screen printing loops.

As soon as you booted the computer, the first thing you were greeted with is that pesky blinking cursor. It’s right there, inviting you.

C’mon. Type something. See what happens.

That’s the ineffable, undeniable beauty of a scripting language. You don’t need to read a giant Larry Wall article, or wait 8 years for Perl 6 to figure that out. It’s right there in front of you. Literally. Try entering this in your browser’s address bar:

javascript:alert(‘hello world’);

But it’s not real programming, right?

My first experience with real programming was in high school. Armed with a purchased copy of the the classic K&R book and a pirated C compiler for my Amiga 1000, I knew it was finally time to put my childish AmigaBASIC programs aside.

Here again is where Jeff and I have the same experience and I’m sure many of you did as well. As soon as I started to want to learn a “real” programming language, and C was the real language of choice for me at that time since I didn’t have Pascal in high school, things went downhill fast.

What happened next was the eight unhappiest hours of my computing life. Between the painfully slow compile cycles and the torturous, unforgiving dance of pointers and memory allocation, I was almost ready to give up programming altogether. C wasn’t for me, certainly. But I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that there was something altogether wrong with this type of programming. How could C suck all the carefree joy out of my stupid little AmigaBASIC adventures? This language took what I had known as programming and contorted it beyond recognition, into something stark and cruel.

I didn’t know it then, but I sure do now. I hadn’t been programming at all. I had been scripting.

I tried very hard to learn C and I could do the typical “Quicksort” and “Hello World” type programs but C sucked! As far as I’m concerned, C STILL sucks and C++ sucks harder!! After I got my feet wet with the “scripting language” AutoLISP, built into AutoCAD, that is when I started programming (or scripting) in earnest.  The whole immediate gratification thing of scripting languages is soooooooo much easier.  It either works or it doesn’t.

I know, I know, I’ll never be a real programmer. But I’ve come to terms with my limitations, because I’m a scripter at heart.

You’re not alone my friend, you’re not alone.

Anyway, read the article: Coding Horror: A Scripter at Heart