commit 5a101458562ac6fe2fe2be887fb5ac6395793895
parent 533e86886c9e4f9f583790924dd7e973770eae41
Author: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano@tronto.net>
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:08:40 +0100
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+# 20 years of programming
+
+The first time I wrote some gibberish on a computer, compiled it and run
+it was over 20 years ago. In this post I want to tell you the story of
+how it all started, and how it continued.
+
+## It started with BASIC
+
+It was the end of 2005, I was 11 years old. A friend of mine shared with
+me this strange program that let you *create other programs*.
+
+This program was called
+[DarkBASIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Creators#DarkBASIC).
+It was an IDE with its own language and game development framework. This
+framework made it quite easy to load pictures, sound and even 3D models,
+but we did not go much further than making a couple of short text
+adventure games, and other less useful programs.
+
+Although I guess one of these "less useful" programs was somewhat
+interesting, since it ultimately made me learn a proper programming
+language. I forgot what exactly this program did, but at some point
+you could input a password. Later in the execution, if you typed this
+password wrong, it would delete the `C:\Windows` folder from your PC. And
+sure enough, I tried it and got the password wrong on the very first try.
+
+Ah, those were days. My only complaint about DarkBASIC is that it bundled
+a lot of stuff when it built your code into an executable, so that even
+the most minimal program would result in a *huge* 1.5Mb binary. Just
+large enough not to fit in a floppy disk. So it was kinda hard to share
+programs with my friends.
+
+Anyways, my parents were not happy with my amazing Windows-erasing
+program, as we had to pay someone to fix the family PC. But my mom
+offered me a deal: if I promised never to make harmful software again,
+she would buy me a book to learn a real programming language. In case you
+did not know, in 2005 you learnt programming languages by reading books.
+
+## The Java phase
+
+
+
+According to the [TIOBE index](https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/),
+Java was the most popular programming language in 2006, and so it
+was chosen as my first *real* programming language.
+
+The book explained how to write, compile and run code the proper way: no
+fancy IDE, just notepad and command-line tools. It took me days, if not
+weeks to figure out how to add `javac` and `java` to the Windows `$PATH`,
+but in the end I made it and I could finally run my Hello World. A couple
+of years later I would switch to Linux, where all of this is trivial;
+to this day I still wonder why some programmers *choose* to use Windows.
+
+This pocket book, and another one that I bought soon afterwards, explained
+many topics, including object-oriented programming and how to make GUI
+applications. I don't think I got OOP at the time - it was meant to solve
+problems I had never encountered. Now that I have been a professional
+software developer for a few years, I don't think I get it either -
+it still does not solve any problem I have encountered; if anything,
+it creates a few more.
+
+I managed to recover some of the
+programs I wrote between 2006 and 2010 in [a git
+repository](https://git.tronto.net/ancient-projects/file/README.md.html).
+The most successful one is JBriscola, a single-player game of
+[briscola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briscola) with a decent AI. It is
+actually quite fun to play, and a few of my friends played it regularly
+back then. It's so cool that they still run on a modern Java runtime -
+good job, Java! Great backwards compatibility.
+
+At some point in 2009 or so I bought a third, more advanced Java book.
+My goal at the time was learning how to make more complex GUI applications
+- something I don't find particularly enjoyable nowadays, but at the
+time I was having a lot of fun with it. But I never read past
+the first half of this book, because my focus shifted to [programming
+challenges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming).
+
+## Competitive programming
+
+I don't remember exactly how it happened, but in 2010, in my second
+year of high school, I qualified for the regional phase of the national
+competitive programming circuit. In school we were learning Pascal (for a
+grand total of 10 hours a year), but I thought that with Java knowledge
+it would have been better to pick up C or C++, the other two languages
+allowed in the contest. And so I did: I learnt just enough C to get by,
+and somehow I qualified for the *Olimpiadi Italiane di Informatica* -
+the national final.
+
+Not only did I qualify, but I also did pretty well in it: I ended
+up in the top-half of the ranking. Considering my young age (the
+competition was open to students of all 5 years of high school,
+and I had just started my 3rd year) I was invited to take part in the
+[IOI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Informatics)
+preparation stages. A new world opened up for me.
+
+In these preparation stages, to which I was invited for three
+consecutive years, I learnt a lot about data structures, algorithms and
+computational complexity. I used C++, although it was very much "C with
+[STL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library)" - I dont
+think I wrote a class or even a struct at the time. But I did not care
+much: C++ was just a tool for a specific task, like Java and DarkBASIC
+were. The task was writing text adventures first, GUI programs later
+and it was now solving puzzles.
+
+In 2012 I qualified for the IOI as a B-team member - the hosting country,
+which was Italy that year, was allowed to bring a second team who could
+compete without appearing in the official rankings. In the end that was
+a good call, as all the members of the A-team did better than me - my
+[results](https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/2818) were not amazing.
+
+
+
+I enjoyed this part of my programming journey a lot. You may think that
+this cemented my passion for coding and turned me into a programmer. But
+somehow, it did the opposite.
+
+## The Math break
+
+Solving programming puzzles made me enjoy problem-solving, logic reasoning
+and formal proofs more than coding. I was also enjoying Math contests
+during high school, and these two things made me realize I wanted to dive
+deeper into the theory, rather than just writing code. So I decided to
+sign up for a Mathematics program at University.
+
+During my first year (2013-2014) I kept coding a little bit: I was
+solving problems on [projecteuler.net](https://projecteuler.net/),
+I learnt some [J](https://www.jsoftware.com/) (an ASCII-based
+[APL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language))
+clone), I started porting JBriscola to
+[Scala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(programming_language)) -
+I wonder if I still have that code somewhere. I even looked into Rust
+and Go, two languages that had just been announced. But I lacked the
+motivation for starting a new project, and soon I would drop all these
+new languages - except J, I still use it as a fancy desktop calculator
+from time to time.
+
+For a while I tried to follow also my passion for computer science by
+taking elective courses in OOP, Algorithms, and Functional Programming.
+But it was not easy to find a study program that combined the two
+subjects in way I liked. I ended up signing up for a pure Math master:
+the [ALGANT](https://algant.eu/) program.
+
+Between 2015 and 2018 I did not write much code outside of the
+little that was needed for my studies. As a noteworthy exception,
+I did take part in the North-West Europe regional phase of the [ACM
+ICPC](https://icpc.global/), a programming contest for university
+students. But even then, I put very little effort into practicing for it -
+I just had other priorities at the time.
+
+## Back at it
+
+After graduating, I doubled down on Math and decided to get
+a PhD. But at the beginning of my PhD, in 2019, I wrote
+some code for work: my supervisor and a colleague of mine had
+devised an algorithm to compute the degrees of certain [field
+extensions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_extension),
+and I [implemented
+it](https://git.tronto.net/kummer-degrees/file/README.md.html).
+
+I don't know if this is what got me back into coding for fun, or if it
+was just a matter of time, but by the end of 2019 I was already thinking
+about writing a Rubik's cube solver. 6 years and two rewrites later,
+I am still working on this project, which became a great sandbox for
+learning new topics and a good source of inspiration for blog posts.
+
+Still during my PhD,
+[COVID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic) hit. Forced to
+spend long hours alone in my one-room apartment, I had more time to code
+and tinker with Linux and OpenBSD. A couple of years later I started
+this blog. As I was now approaching the end of my PhD, I had to decide
+if I wanted to continue in academia or do something else.
+
+And I chose to do something else: I chose to become a software developer.
+
+## Now it's (not just) my job
+
+When I applied for jobs as a software engineer, I thought there was a
+chance I could get fed up with programming and quit it as a hobby. After
+all, I liked Math, but when I was a PhD student I did not do much of it
+in my weekend or my free time.
+
+But coding was different. I can't seem to get tired of it nowadays. If
+during the week I write C# for a living, in the weekend I work on my C
+projects or hack on shell scripts. If at day I work with Python, at night
+I solve puzzles in C++ or play around with [Hare](https://harelang.org/).
+When I had a few idle months between projects, I learnt some Rust,
+some QT and [ported my C program to WebAssembly](../2025-06-06-webdev).
+I listen to programming talks and podcasts while I cook and do the dishes.
+
+No, I did not get tired of programming. Maybe I never will.
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