Chris Howard's Remarkable Journey into the World of Programming

Today, we're celebrating Programmers' Day! The 'Day of the Programmer' is observed on the 256th day of the year, typically falling on September 13th. International Programmers' Day is a celebration of the positive impact programmers have on improving our lives.

We've asked our CEO, Chris Howard , to share his story about learning programming languages and creating his first lines of code. Enjoy the journey!

The first program I wrote was with my younger brother. He was taking a summer BASIC programming class, and it was full, so I couldn’t attend. So I taught myself BASIC and worked on it with him. We called the game Skyfox, and you played it on a paper teletype terminal that connected over the phone to a computer at a university. You were flying a plane, and it would print out a gunsight. Your goal was to move the “+” sight over an enemy plane (represented by an X), and I thought I was being clever to use an asterisk * when the + was over the X. Once you fired, we moved the typing carriage, so it sounded like machine guns, and if you shot the plane down it would ring the bell. To store the program, the teletype would punch holes in a paper tape, which I still have. My only formal programming class was FORTAN in college, and we punched each line of the program into a paper Hollerith card…if you dropped the stack, your program was scrambled! But my favorite programming language has to be assembly language. Once you know Assembly, you know how the processor works, and how all other programming languages work. I’ve taught myself over a dozen different programming languages over the years, from BASIC to Pascal to C to C++ to C# to Assembly and even ADA. The last one I learned just recently was Befunge, for our Softeq deck of cards.?

Share with us in the comments which programming language you learned first.