Steve Sloan

Steve Sloan

Hacker, drummer, primate

“Luxury!”

If you’re reading my obscure blog, you probably saw the article on Slashdot linking to a blog article where various notable programmers answer questions about their history and preferences. My favorite has got to be:

How did you learn programming? Were any schools of any use? Or maybe you didn’t even bother with ending any schools :) ?

*Steve Yegge:
I taught myself to program on an HP calculator using their RPN stack language when I was 17 years old.

Now, I’m a big fan of HP calculators and RPN (had and loved a 48GX in school), but I never considered it as a good “development platform”. I’m not sure what it says about Mr. Yegge that he learned to code in RPN on a calculator, but I think it says it very loudly.

For the record, I taught myself to program in BASIC on a VIC-20 with a cassette tape drive (circa 1983). But at least it had a QWERTY keyboard … Luxury.

Updated:

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