Basic
Monday, June 25th, 2007When I was in elementary school, I taught myself how to program in a computer language called BASIC. My favorite program was poker. The player would bet, the computer would shuffle the cards and deal, and so on. Years later, Visual BASIC came along and I lost interest. There wasn’t much I wanted to do with Visual BASIC that I couldn’t do with regular BASIC.
For the last couple years, I’ve been working with web developers and computer programmers pretty frequently without understanding much code. Yeah, I taught myself HTML. But PHP, JavaScript, and other languages seemed like Visual BASIC all over again — once I learned them, they’d pretty much do what BASIC did, but with webpages and online forms.
The thing is, developers and programmers I met (all except for one) assumed that BASIC was laughably… basic. I told them I could learn anything they showed me, but mostly they laughed. I guess if you’re a PHP programmer, you don’t want to hear it’s just basic.
This week, I wanted to ask people questions online. I wrote the script for it myself because it seemed easier than trying to explain to skeptics what I wanted. First I wrote a version of the script I wanted in an updated version of BASIC called “Just BASIC.” I set down and found a webpage with JavaScript, and this script asked questions, really simply. Finding this script was the moment of truth. I said to myself, “Oh, so there IS a script that does what I want, in a simple way!” It was the moment of truth because I’d been told by some developers that what I wanted was impossible. I taught myself some JavaScript from that script, and then I found other JavaScript features I wanted on other scripts and learned how to do them, too. A search for { JavaScript tutorial } found http://www.w3schools.com/ which is a very straightforward and helpful resource.
Over a few days, I did troubleshooting and voila! JavaScript. The funny thing is though, it’s just like BASIC.
Most people don’t even know BASIC though, so I’ll try to show you a little of what I mean. Let’s say you want a computer to do the same things, over and over again, but in a slightly different way each time. Maybe you want the computer to see whether someone answered questions 1 through 15, and if they did, you want the computer to record their answer. Instead of writing out what the computer does, 15 times, you write it out once, and then repeat 15 times. This kind of repeating is called a “loop,” just like a loop on an old-school cassette tape. To loop in BASIC, you can write, “For x = 1 to 15….” And each time the computer finishes the same set of instructions, x = x + 1… and you do the loop all over again, 15 times. JavaScript does looping too, almost the exact same way.
And now I’m learning PHP. PHP is more useful to me than JavaScript because it lets me send emails and save information to databases. But the basics of PHP are just like JavaScript and BASIC.
So to all ya’ll developers who laughed when I said I could learn PHP because I knew BASIC, if they wanted to show me….please. To those same developers who complained, “No one understands what we do”….please. Do you want people to understand what you do?
I’m disappointed it took me this long to learn a little code. Next, I want to learn a little more Portuguese than the very little Spanish I already know.
I’m also surprised how easy it was for me to go along with, and eventually adopt, the developers’ assumption that I couldn’t easily learn PHP, just because I wasn’t a developer.
There was one developer, Ed, who I hired as a consultant a few months ago. He taught me some code and explained what he was doing, and appreciated when I picked it up quickly. Thanks to him for taking down part of this wall, this wall I’d started to picture getting higher and higher between me and what people who call themselves developers do.
And golly, this week I’ve learned how easy it was to assume something’s impossible. And how easy it is to find out how easy it is.
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June 25th, 2007 at 3:25 am
Php is quite an easy language to start with, but as they say, the car can go as fast as the driver wishes it to go !. So it all depends on the programmer to code great stuff using any programming language.