hello world!
Many moons ago there was a youngling who remembers hiding into between office desks in a labyrinthine world of bigger peoples. This youngling grew up with interesting metal boxes with curious buttons, large slots, many long multicolored cords, and the din of office clicky sounds, phone calls, and paper shuffling. In short, I grew up around computers. It's as good a beginning as any.
When I was very young my father introduced me to basic programming. First, I built a loop that's featured as the title of this blog. Then I built a short choose your own adventure game where I created a simple world that progressed with multiple choice selections. It was rudimentary. It was simple. It was my beginning.
Declarations are powerful. As is the structure surrounding it. Should one use punctuation? Complex sentence structure? Single words? Proper capitalization? Why not an exclamation point? That choice is still significant for me. At that young and tender age, I knew my actions were important. I knew that adding the exclamation was a declaration. How could I guess that that first step would culminate is a journey for the next 30 years? I knew it was a beginning.
I had barely been playing with the Atari 2600 let alone Nintendo or the Sega Master System. There was no such thing as the web, Netscape, yahoo chat groups, AOL, or other older, massively adopted technologies of the time. I knew nothing about Pascal which was my first REAL programming language. I knew nothing about MUDS and LPC which were my first REAL game dev projects. I knew nothing about pen and paper games where I got my first REAL call to action. I knew nothing about testing system extents (Thanks Dax!) I knew nothing and it was a beginning.
Hello World is a strong, meaningful, historic, and powerful statement. Hello World is the first print statement using any programming language. Hello world... was also the first chapter of the basic programming textbook I read. I didn't know any of that when I was a youngling. And it was my beginning.
And so, it's not the 80s anymore. That's my beginning as I remember it. It's faulty, very old, yet full of promise and led to a fantastic journey.
I took programming courses in high school with Pascal and C all the while working and playing on an LPC MUD building content, classes, and enemies for folks to digitally beat up. I minor'd in computer science in college, while working on those same MUDs. I've been a game designer for 9 years and so we come to today.
Hello world! Let's get cracking.
