Thank Heaven I’m Not Learning To Program in 2026

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Why aren't people excited about programming? I am so glad that I learned back in the 1980s rather than today. Uh, as I said in a previous video about another broader subject, there does seem to be a sort of a cynicism that's crept in. And I think partly that's to do with the way that people learn to program.

[00:00:20]And partly it's to do with the fact that we are just overwhelmed with computer technologies. It's taken for granted.

[00:00:29]and um increasingly seems out of our control. Now when I learned to program back in the 1980s, I used well something like this. This is actually top speed modular 2 which is a great modular 2 programming language developed by the top speed uh company corporation um I think it was called in London and that was some people that had come from Borland the people who developed Turbo Pascal which was a big big programming compiler in those days in fact that's where I started was with Turbo Pascal and they came across to London to develop uh this modular tool 2 system.

[00:01:10]Wonderful. Not only was it a great uh environment and compiler for its day, but the language modular 2 is such a lovely language. And that's another thing. I think the languages that people learn these days, the ones that people start off with are, how can I be polite, pretty pedestrian.

[00:01:32]They don't have great ideas. they don't have the sense that this is really taking the whole programming um process to a new level. So with modular 2 the big idea was tight very strict modularity so that nothing could get at code that belonged to something else. wasn't object-oriented, but it was trying to do some of the things that early objectoriented systems like small talk, which I'll mention again in a moment, uh were also trying to do, which was to encapsulate, as we say in an object-oriented um terminology, uh the the data and the the functions in in modular to they were encapsulated or they were um located.

[00:02:21]were tightly bound into uh modules and they had to be exported and imported before they could be reused. And the idea was that if I had written some code and you were going to use it, I could be fairly clear that you didn't have access to code that you shouldn't have access to, that it's my job to create one module, and it's your job to use it. And I specify exactly what you have access to and how you use it. It's for um safety uh code safety so your program doesn't accidentally do something it shouldn't do and code reuse and um and the idea that the code you write is behaves predictably that it doesn't have unexpected side effects. Now as I said I I briefly mentioned small talk. Small talk was uh the first really big important object-oriented language that affected everything else. When I started programming, we weren't using objects.

[00:03:22]Small talk was in development at that time, but very few people in the real world like me, an ordinary person had access to it. But again, small talk was a language with huge ideas. Uh not only was it promoting the idea of object orientation uh with message, I mean, I won't go into the details. I've got a whole series if you go to my uh channel, you'll see the a playlist all about the great ideas of object orientation from small talk onwards. But it was promoting this this idea of reusable objects that could respond to messages which is a bit like the interfaces to modules in modular 2 uh not only for neatness and code reuse but also for code safety.

[00:04:06]Anyway, let's come forward to today.

[00:04:09]What have we got? Back in those days, people were mostly learning with one of the Pascal languages. Turop Pascal was really big in the early to mid 80s or with C. Uh there were others people were in in uh other areas writing in forran and cobalt and such like older languages. But if you were learning, you were most likely to be using either Pascal or C. Both of those languages impose great demands, I would say, upon the programmer. Pascal is quite strict. I know a lot of people when I've written about Pascal, when I've discussed Pascal on YouTube, some programmers think that it's too strict and they don't like the idea that you've got to declare your variables in a certain place and everything has to be typed in a certain way and it it is really quite quite a um it enforces a programming style. C was not that strict. C let you get away with and and still does let you get away with all sorts of things which could cause huge problems which you could not really easily program in Pascal because Pascal would stop you doing it at a much earlier stage in the programming process. But what C did was it taught people, it required programmers to learn about low-level programming, about computer architecture, how memory worked, how you accessed memory, what addresses were, um, how you put data at certain addresses, how arrays worked.

[00:05:42]And this is something I've tried to explain in other videos on YouTube and it's for a mo more modern programmer who's never battled through all this in C. It's really hard work that trying to explain what an array is in as far as the computer is concerned and as far as C is concerned. It's not this high level structure that you might have come across in C, Java or um or Python.

[00:06:08]And that's another thing the the people learning these days are very frequently starting with Python. A few people would use Java or or some other language. But um even Java it it pro it protects you from a lot of the things that you would have to know about in C. You don't have to use pointers. You don't have to uh deal with memory access with freeing up uh memory or and so on. Uh Python is is a very permissive language. you can do all sorts of things in Python um and frequently not cause yourself too many headaches. Whereas in C, if you try to do similar sort of things, your program would crash. So why don't I why don't I feel as excited about the modern programming environment as back in the 80s? Well, of course, I mean, it's certain to a certain extent. simply because I've been programming a very long time and maybe the excitement has worn off. But I think there is more to it than that. I think there are two things. One is the lack of rigor um in modern programming languages, the ones that people learn with. There are fewer demands that you have to grapple with both intellectually both in terms of understanding and in terms of dealing with the syntactical uh requirements of a language like modular 2. Um secondly as I said earlier it's the uh allervasive presence of technology. I think people just take it for granted.

[00:07:39]And the third thing I would say is also that uh with a lot of modern programming you feel that you are a tiny tiny cog in a big machine. So if you want to program a game you might use a framework like Unity. All the physics, all the uh graphic operations are already there for you. You just have to learn how to use them. And other people might have created your models, your cars, your planes, your animated characters.

[00:08:08]And you can certainly program using C.

[00:08:10]I've done it myself at a very basic level. uh but you the end result you have only contributed a very tiny part to when I learned to program my big project and the one that I still recommend to people today was a text adventure game this is something like the old infoc in fact my first really big programming project which I I released and is still available online is called the golden womb but of destiny and it was a a text adventure I had to do all the well everything everything from start to finish I created the world, the rooms, the the parser, you know, the to interpret commands, um how to save and load data, every single thing I had to learn. And I still think that's a great project. I encourage people who are learning to program to do the same thing in whatever programming language, even if it's um you know, a language such as Python or or C or Java, you can still do that. Or or a language without traditional object orientation. I've recently shown some examples using Go, the Golang language, which doesn't have inheritance, but you can still do a game full of objects and sort of have a a hierarchy of objects. And it's a great programming project. And that is really really exciting to do something from start to finish all yourself. No graphics libraries, no physics libraries to worry about. You've done everything.

[00:09:38]Anyway, I still think programming is exciting, but you need a good project to to uh learn it. And I would recommend if you're a younger programmer or, you know, just starting out, if you've started with a language that um you know, such as Python, don't forget C at least and um really learn how the computer works. It is exciting. And let's get rid of the cynicism.