The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer

[dandymcgee]

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
Interesting story of how real programmers worked before "high-level" tools like compilers existed.

[Skomakar'n]

I've read this before. I love it. I need to bookmark it this time. Thanks for the link!

[dandymcgee]

This one is also a good read for anyone who has ever taken a programming history course.

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/b ... wrong.html

[THe Floating Brain]

I want to write in Machine Code now XD

[Nokurn]

Story time?

When I was younger (maybe 11 or 12), I was in the process of learning php (I chose php for my server-side scripting language because it was similar to C, which I already knew). I'd just realized you could make CLI programs with php, so I tried coming up with programs that I could make for the command prompt. One of the programs I made was something for doing hex dumps and reversing hex dumps (and you could do stuff like commenting). I did it on an exe file and realized, you could totally write programs like this! So I ordered a copy of the Intel architecture manuals (for the instruction set reference) and went to town making little programs in machine code. Of course, I ended up with COM executables instead of PE (and wasn't aware of it at the time), but it was fun. I felt like such a badass. That's where I really started to think like a computer. I can also say that I learned machine code before assembly, which I find pretty cool.

[THe Floating Brain]

Story time?

When I was younger (maybe 11 or 12), I was in the process of learning php (I chose php for my server-side scripting language because it was similar to C, which I already knew). I'd just realized you could make CLI programs with php, so I tried coming up with programs that I could make for the command prompt. One of the programs I made was something for doing hex dumps and reversing hex dumps (and you could do stuff like commenting). I did it on an exe file and realized, you could totally write programs like this! So I ordered a copy of the Intel architecture manuals (for the instruction set reference) and went to town making little programs in machine code. Of course, I ended up with COM executables instead of PE (and wasn't aware of it at the time), but it was fun. I felt like such a badass. That's where I really started to think like a computer. I can also say that I learned machine code before assembly, which I find pretty cool.

Badass

And thought it was cool that I started learning C++ when I was 12