10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"

Well, I finally got around to "blogging". Everyone and their brother seems to be blogging these days, but I just haven't ever found something I wanted to blog about. But then I thought, "Hey, I've been programming for 25 years now. I might have something to say about it after all this time."

Yeah, 25 years. Well, not all of it was professional ;-) Unless you count writing your own Star Trek shoot-em-up game on the Apple IIe as "professional experience". I've been writing software professionally (I guess that's when you get paid to do it) for 12 years now. However you look at it, it's been a good few years of coding.

I love writing software. It's hard to put into terms that don't sound corny or weird. But the best way to explain it I have found is that I would write software even if I didn't get paid for it. There were a few years there where I had other jobs, and I always found myself thinking about programming or coding up little scripts. Why wouldn't I? It's fun!

But I have to confess that doing it professionally can sometimes take the fun out of it. I guess that is why work is called work--sometimes it isn't tremendous amounts of fun to pound away at a problem when you would rather be hanging out with friends or fishing (ah, fishing ... that's another topic). But even at it's worst, I still love writing software for a living. You still get to solve problems, write clever little tidbits of code, and sometimes even build something pretty impressive. And hey, putting food on the table while doing something you love is pretty great--better than what most people have to do for a living!

A couple of years ago, I was browsing in an antique shop. I'm not an antiquer--nor am I really a shopper. This is code for "I was tagging along with my wife while she browsed/shopped/meandered through an antique shop". I was just doing my husbandly duty: trying not to appear too bored or to whine about wanting to move on (whether that whine is verbal or non-verbal). Anyways, I see this stack of old magazines and I find this old men's magazine called True. Never heard of it (turns out it wasn't in print long), but it was kind of funny to read a men's magazine from 1968. It had the typical reviews of cars, and reviews of stereo equipment. Even a (now) hilarious article about dating.

But I found the following advertisment in there. It so caught my eye that I surprised my wife and actually bought something. When we got home, I immediately hooked up the scanner and scanned in the full page; this is only the "book" part of it--the text of the ad is classic:

"If you're dissatisfied with your present job, why don't you become a programmer? So great is the demand for programmers, you'll have your choice of openings, with a growing future ahead."

Wow! Who wouldn't want to become a programmer?!? I mean, with such demand and a choice of positions? And look at that photo! Just look at it! Who wouldn't want to work with those clean-cut, upstanding young Americans? That guy on the right really looks like he knows what he is doing. That sharp-dressing young woman clearly thinks so--that, or she's pointing out he has his english-to-metrics conversions all wrong. The guy on the left looks to me like he just likes to be in the computer room, watching the tape reels spin (and hey, youngsters, if you haven't seen those things in action, you don't know what you are missing!). But what do I know? He probably invented some cool banking algorithm for all I know.

All joking aside, this ad just warms my heart. Maybe it is because, despite being cynical now, I would have read a similar ad when I was in High School and thought, "Oh yeah! I'm going to be a programmer and it is going to be soooo cool!" And in fact, it was, and is, cool. I'm one lucky guy, and I get to work in a great field. And I'll be writing software for a long time to come, even if it is only for my own amusement.