The Benefits of Learning How to Program Computers
I still remember the excitement I felt when I wrote my first basic program on the BBC Micro at school. It was a simple four-line program that drew a triangle on the screen. In the early 1980s, we enjoyed playing games such as Chuckie Egg and the famous Granny's Garden on the BBC Micro which was the first computer we were introduced to, but the real excitement was getting the computer to perform tasks in the basic programming language. Simple programs that drew shapes or printed text on the screen weren't exactly ground-breaking but it was enough to whet my appetite for programming and set me on the path to programming games on other computers such as the Spectrum, Atari ST and Amiga. ( Software ) In the good old days of the Spectrum, you could buy magazines that feature pre-written games in basic code that you could type into your own Spectrum and hope the program ran okay. This was a great way of learning how code works and what commands do what. Books on basic programming w...