Programming as a Hobby

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 | Editorial

Everyone needs a hobby, I’ve heard it said. For me, programming is my hobby. Perhaps as a hobby programming is a bit off the beaten path, but I submit that it’s as valid a hobby as arts and crafts or anything else, and it’s a hobby I want to share.

When I was a child my father introduced me to BASIC on the Commodore 64. He used it for some simple finance related stuff, but when he showed me how I could command and the computer would obey I spent every homework hour I could get away with and a whole summer or two communing with that Commodore 64. BASIC was the operating system for the C64 which meant without any effort more than typing you could start programming. It was thrilling. Every time you turned on the computer its friendly “READY” was an invitation as benevolent and promising as the genie’s “your wish is my command.”

Time rolled on and soon enough the Commodore was packed away, replaced by our first IBM-PCjr, and BASIC had pretty much gone away. Then I discovered a treasure in my High School’s library: “101 BASIC games” and “More BASIC games” both edited by David H. Ahl. When I first read these books Super Nintendo fought Sega Genesis home system supremacy, and top of the line video games were still available for a week’s allowance at the arcade. There were much cooler games to be played all around me but as cool as they were I had more of an interest in the process of making the games. I poured over outdated BASIC books that probably would have been removed from my High School’s library had any of the adults known better. But there was something about code that captivated me and it’s taken more than a decade to decipher why.

Imagine a fort built of Lincoln Logs, and next to it the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sewer Battle play set. Why would a child prefer the rough wooden fort to the detailed plastic toys based on a popular franchise? The answer is the Lincoln Log fort has something the licensed toy does not, and that’s ownership. Even if you were simply following the instructions the work involved made it yours.

Like Legos and Lincoln Logs, programming means that even though what you’ve done may not be as nice as what you could buy you made it and made it yours. Unfortunately it’s not as easy to program now as it was on the Commodore 64, but the satisfaction for those who are willing to go though the initial headache of setting up a compiler is still present.