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hpr_transcripts/hpr0262.txt

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+Episode: 262
+Title: HPR0262: Programming 101: The Basics
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0262/hpr0262.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:00:14
+
+---
+
+music
+music
+music
+music
+music
+music
+Welcome to Hiccup Radio everyone, my name is Soak, today I'm going to be talking about
+programming 101.
+I'm going to do a series of programming to try to impart some of the things I've learned
+in the past, all called a century, that I've been coding.
+So first a brief history of my experience.
+When I was around seven or eight, not exactly sure when it was, but I'm going to use seven
+for reasons that will become clear soon.
+So when I was seven, my brother being the lucky git that he is, he wanted that expression
+48k.
+We're here if you don't know what that is.
+We had various games for it, but we also bought some of the Spectrum magazines that had
+code, or Spectrum Basic code, in each one for a little game, and there were things like
+to snake, nothing fancy at all, in fact you can get better stuff from cell phones nowadays.
+But I got used to typing up the code, and then checking for my typos, and then checking
+for the typos that I type in when I tried to correct the typos that, where you get the
+idea.
+Trying to write someone else's code in when you don't know a huge amount of coding is rather
+a pain, especially when it's printed in a magazine and sometimes they don't print it
+too clearly, but it introduced me to programming.
+Being Spectrum, as with most games back then, you could actually break into the code and
+look at it and change it, and I used to hack the code around to give me infinite lives
+or whatever.
+Of course I sucked back then, I would actually delete any lines that gave me an error, but
+it got me into looking at the code.
+I kept at it for a few years, upgrading to a Spectrum Plus 3, with those weird 3-inch
+double-sided floppy disk.
+Yes, 3 inches, and yes, you can actually take the disk out, physically flip it over and
+use the other side, and it was like 170k on each side, 180 or something.
+At school we had BBC's, again just we hear it if you don't know.
+Some per classroom, so I didn't get to do a whole amount there, although BBC Basic
+was similar to Spectrum Basic, because it's the whole basic thing.
+From there I moved on to an Amiga, running Wordbench, I think 1.3 at the time, then 1.4,
+forget exactly, but Wordbench, and this is where I really started to get around to messing
+around with computers.
+I had the command line set up with a ton of shortcuts, now could fly around and do loads
+of stuff.
+I played around so much and had a few friends that doubled, but no one quite as much
+as I did.
+I was now at secondary school, which is roughly high school for any American's listening,
+where they had RM Nimbus's mainly, and a lab with some BBC's there.
+I started spending time in the computer labs and coding stupid little things, a paint
+programme here, and so on, so forth.
+We had a student teacher for a time for maths, and she taught us programming.
+The first lesson we were taught to write a programme to find the square root, or the
+square root to three significant figures if it was one of these weird ones that carries
+on forever.
+The SQL function would have been the one line up, but we would say we could not do this,
+but we had to take half the number, and then square that and see if it was higher
+or lower than the result we wanted, and then move one way to half between that number
+and that zero, and anyway.
+I read the code in a few lines, I think it was six or so with a few comments.
+Whilst we were waiting for everyone to take their seats in class, we were discussing how
+many lines people had used, another friend had used less, but I felt his was a little
+more confusing.
+I'll come on to that in a moment, I'm more of a code that likes to have more lines
+code that's much easier to read than a one line that does everything.
+The teacher was at the front, we were actually at the desk, right to the front, and she said
+she'd written the code in 20 lines.
+I realised at that point I wasn't going to learn anything from her.
+You see, I used a loop and she hadn't, but I'll explain loops in another episode.
+Fast forward to university, I was doing a degree in computing, not anything else, no major
+mind, things like the US, just computing, pure, plain and simple.
+I learned a bunch of things, assembly, prologue, pascal, visual basic C, and a few others
+like a weird language written by the lecturer.
+I bought my first computer for it's 6DX266, if I remember correctly, four mega memory.
+Windows 3.1 and DOS, five or something on it.
+I played some games, coded a few things.
+One of my friends was actually running Linux, but I never actually picked it up from there.
+Maybe a missed opportunity.
+So I spent some time coding and messing around, played with the Unix machines and the
+lab and geeking out way too much.
+This is where I got into muds, if you remember, the deviates interview.
+Then I got a job as a coder and I wrote C on my first day.
+The company was more of the B shop actually, so I spent most of my time working in Visual
+Basic, and there's some Clipper and a few Quick Basics, and I spent about nine years at
+the company first developing and then I got shifted to supporters there outsourcing the
+development.
+But I got a little proud of my work.
+I wanted to make generic code that would work in different places.
+For example, someone had written a printing module for Clipper, and this is great.
+I mean, really beautiful.
+I mean, who would you call appreciate this?
+You can say things like, dear name, i-something-slash-i, and it would populate name from the
+database with the person's name and then the i-slash-i would be converted to italics.
+By looking at driver files, we'd create ourselves with a third line or whatever it was, which
+had italics on and fourth line, which was italics off for that specific printer.
+This is great.
+You call the program and passable printer type, and it works for any printer that we had
+drivers for, and we could write more drivers just by looking at the printer manuals.
+I actually help code similar one in Quick Basic.
+It can't take all the credit.
+When the company merged, we gained a ton more printers, of course none of which were the
+same types we had.
+Quick 10-15 minutes later and we could get people printing on any of the new printers.
+Now, about 10-15 minutes of our work to make the driver file, then maybe 15-30 minutes
+testing the few apps, and then wait three weeks to get the file copied over to the
+production environment.
+But that's another story, that's the way the business worked.
+So I started getting a little proud of my work, and I loved it when I could fix and help
+someone out, and I tried to make the programmers in up to pieces of possible.
+So when the users get a form back from the client, they fill it into a program 20 to the
+details, and you have the program screen matching the forms, so they can just read from the
+form to form to form, and copy straight across.
+You have it, so you can actually tap from one input to the next, automatically, or if
+it's a date automatically go through when 6 digits or 8 after the year 2000, we're filled
+in.
+This made it so much easier for the user, because they didn't have to keep clicking
+on the screen.
+They could have the form up next to the screen, and if they could touch type, they could
+touch type through it and do it up really quickly.
+Some of the people I worked with got this and some didn't.
+Anyway, so I left that job for various reasons, I can't really go into it, it's contractual
+stuff.
+If someone wants to pay me like 100 grand, I'll explain, but it's a long story.
+But I left on my own, I wasn't fired or about to be fired or anything, and had I not left
+I may still be there to this day.
+They did redundancies, and they were rating people on scores from that redundancy, so I took
+full redundancy, and my score was, I can't remember, I think I scored like 29 or something
+on the cutoff was like 23, so there was no way I would have actually been fired.
+So I don't know, now I'm 32, and if I say I started at 8.7 and not 8, see I told you,
+I mentioned this again, and that is actually 25 years, or a quarter century I've coded
+before.
+Admittedly, really bad at the start, but I like to think I'm an above average coder.
+Actually, having seen a lot of the example coder helps, and I'd say I'm a top coder,
+but I don't have much faith in a lot of the code people put out there.
+I don't actually think it's that difficult to become a top coder.
+I'm not, by any means, the best.
+I am not learners, tall vows, or any of that kind of thing, but I'm a pretty good programmer.
+So I'm going to try and part some of the things I've learnt over the years.
+If anyone disagrees from me on anything I say, please let me know, and we can discuss
+why I think this is, and why you think that is.
+And I would love to learn some more tips and tricks from people here.
+That's one of the reasons I'm doing some of these, so if people can teach me stuff,
+I don't know.
+I think that's brilliant.
+And by actually doing the episodes with myself, I can say, I'm going to do one of programming
+and get a discussion started about it.
+So anyway, programming basics.
+I'm not going to go into any specific languages for now.
+I will try and explain the mindset and similar, and a lot of the programming techniques are
+the same no matter what the language, and if you only learn one language, your stuff
+because the fastest being popular, you're then in trouble.
+It's like driving.
+You don't just drive any car, not how to drive a specific car.
+ABS brakes, for example, analog brake system.
+Pre ABS brakes.
+You don't just dump on the brakes itself, you have to dump some, dump, dump, dump, dump.
+If it's oily or snow or whatever.
+If you dump on the brakes, you'd skid.
+After ABS, dump on the brakes, ABS figures it for you.
+You learn why, and it makes you better about it.
+You don't just learn how for that particular one, because if you learn how to drive on an
+ABS car, dump on the brakes, that's how to do it.
+You then try to drive a pre ABS car, dump on the brakes, or you crash and die.
+So learn why, learn about it.
+So I've got a quick quiz for you.
+This is quite simple, but it tries to explain the mindset why some things still have bugs
+while most things.
+Imagine you're trying to write a program to boil a kettle, to make yourself a hot drink.
+The old style stick it on the stove and it will whistle when it's done.
+I want you to write out a list of instructions that you all need to do this.
+Simple English language will do.
+Nothing fancy.
+I'll wait here.
+Okay, I actually just paused the podcast and do this.
+I'll always get really boring.
+Seriously, I would actually let you stop and I actually just think about it.
+Okay?
+All right.
+Hopefully you've done that now.
+So I'm imagining you're going to have something like fill kettle, turn, stay on, put the kettle
+there, wait for whistle, take kettle of stove, make tea or whatever.
+Yeah?
+Well, congratulations.
+You just burnt your house down.
+You didn't turn the stove off, did you?
+Or maybe you burnt it down because the whistle was broken and you never checked on it.
+Or you ever filled the kettle because there was water in it from last time.
+And you didn't check how much was there.
+Or maybe the stove had no parents that would never make the water boil.
+Or a million other things that could go wrong and mess it up.
+This is what coatings like.
+You have to think of all the possible ways that could go wrong and try to prevent it.
+So the new improved way for boiling the water would be presumably something like pick
+up the kettle, look at water level, if under a cup full or however much you need, fill
+water to a cup full.
+Turn, stay on, put kettle on stove, check light is on a gas or whatever, so the kettle
+wouldn't boil.
+Wait through the whistle or 10 minutes, whichever comes first.
+Turn, stay off, confirm it's off, take the kettle off the stove, make tea or whatever.
+Not likely more complicated, but it should work and it's looking good.
+We've covered some of the obvious things that could go wrong.
+I'm sure I will have missed bits.
+I didn't check the kettle was leaking or similar so you don't need to tell me it wasn't
+going to be right.
+It's just an example to try and make you think in that kind of manner.
+Now computer language is very in several ways.
+The main one is how high or low level it is.
+A very low level language would be the ones in zeros, whereas the high level language
+would be more like English.
+Assembly code for example is hard to read as the lowest you can get basically without
+going to ones in zeros, because it gets converted straight into ones in zeros.
+Assembly code would be something like more VH, BH, Bint 21H and so on and so forth.
+Yeah, I can't remember what that does, actually it doesn't do anything depending on what's
+in various registers, but it's been a long time since it is assembly, but it's really
+confusing.
+Don't even have real words.
+See for example is still a low-ish level language, but it is more readable.
+For example, printf, open brackets quotes, hello world quotes, close brackets, semicolon.
+That would print hello world onto the screen.
+Well, actually it wouldn't if you just did that because you need libraries stuff, but that's
+just the one line you need.
+Assuming you've got the libraries, that one line would print hello world onto the screen.
+Visual basically there is a high level language and would be print quotes, hello world quotes,
+and that would put it out.
+Now the English language is a wonderful thing.
+It allows me to do a podcast like this and talk on it, but it is incredibly fake for
+some things.
+For example, the sentence, I didn't put Indian ink in the washing machine.
+I tried to read that with no information.
+Now let's try stressing different words.
+I didn't put Indian ink in the washing machine, but I know who did.
+I didn't put Indian ink on the washing machine.
+I threw it in there.
+I didn't put Indian ink in the washing machine.
+It was permanent ink.
+I didn't put Indian ink in the washing machine.
+It was an Indian curry.
+I didn't put Indian ink in the washing machine.
+I poured it on top.
+I didn't put Indian ink in the washing machine.
+I put it on the photocopier.
+So depending on what would I stress, it changes the entire sentence.
+Progaming languages are designed to be pure.
+One thing means only one thing.
+That simple.
+There is no way a computer can get confused over what each word means.
+Of course, if you write random words, the computer is still going to have no clue,
+but it isn't for many vagueness of the language.
+Now the plan on these podcasts is that I will cover some things in the language each
+episode and build them up so you can write some simple programs.
+Although I've yet to decide on the language, as I mentioned earlier, I have done a turn
+of my time.
+And as I've decided, I should probably pick one of the following for various reasons.
+Because Linux is written in C, and therefore I could actually get some code in the kernel,
+which would be really cool.
+Although one strike against it, I did do C in the past, and I was thinking about learning
+at a new language.
+PHP, because it's on the web, and things like Drupal use PHP, should be quite a marketable
+skill, and as everyone seems to be going web-based, it would be useful on Python.
+Because again, you can do web with it and you can write Python scripts.
+I decided against a few things like Mono because, well, there's a few big question marks
+over it, and it's C sharp, like I said before, it's not a new or new to me language.
+And I didn't want to do Pearl because, well, Wanderer does it, and well, just listen to
+the Linux crank subset about that, if you want to know more about that.
+So I'm leaning towards PHP at the moment.
+I would like some feedback though, because language anyone really wants me to do.
+Give me some reasons, I'll consider it.
+Otherwise, I will be pressing on with PHP.
+And next time, I'll go through Installing PHP, some of the basics, and writing a Hello World
+program, because I'm sure there is actually a law somewhere that states the first period
+of manual writes for a new language, must say Hello World.
+So if you want to let me know, either comment on the HPR page, or go vote at zog.org-po-ll.
+That is, of course, not P-O-L-E.
+I have had this up for a while.
+And so far, as of the 29th December at 121 in the morning, Western Time Pacific Standards
+time, we have one vote for C, two votes for PHP, six for Python, and two for other.
+Now, based on that, it may end up doing Python.
+I think I prefer PHP, but no big deal either way.
+So anyway, that's kind of the basic code for you.
+I'm not going to do any more just yet, trying to get this one out fairly, quickly, fairly
+easily for the beginning of the new year.
+And because I was late for the last one, so I want to get this sorted out.
+And so we'll be going through some of these things, how to install the programming language,
+various tools, like I'm like in G-NEE, for example, for writing the code, because it highlights
+syntax highlighting for things like that.
+Then we'll go through some basic things, and we'll probably get not much further than
+doing Hello World.
+But I'm planning on doing a bunch of these, and if there's a specific thing someone wants
+me to write, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we had a little program that did this?
+Something really simple that I could actually explain in an HGRI episode, and move for it.
+Maybe something really simple, like just sorting out anagrams of something.
+You put in some text, it gives you the anagrams from them.
+Something really simple like that, that isn't going to require a huge amount of code, and
+not expecting anyone to turn around and say, hey, wrote a new link in this kernel, and
+I definitely want to be doing that.
+Thank you for listening.
+If you've got any questions, you can email me at zooksorryatgmail.com, that's xray osca
+kilo echo Sierra osca Romeo uniform at gmail.com, or you can visit me at zook.org xray osca
+kilo echo dot osca Romeo golf.
+Thank you for your time, and you've been listening to Hack of Public Radio.
+Thank you for listening to Hack of Public Radio.
+HPR is mounted by caro.net, so head on over to caro.nc for all of us with you.