Over on my twitter stream, there was a brief conversation on first programming languages.
Assuming you don’t count Zork, my first programming language was TI-BASIC, initially on the TI-82 but really on the TI-83. It started with creating a blackjack game because I was bored in class[1]. In short order, though, I was programming the TI-82 to do my homework and tests for me. The trickiest part of this was convincing the TI-82 how to show its work, because it constantly wanted to just crank out computations. Ironically, the amount of work I put into programming the calculator probably exceeded the total amount of work required to do my homework and take the tests.
Worse, this backfired when we got deeply into proofs, because there was a whole creative aspect that I utterly failed on — without the ability to rapidly recall trigonometric rules, doing trigonometry proofs became very, very tough. Not really learning my lesson, I then cruised into statistics with my TI-83, and it was all over. I still have that calculator, and it’s still loaded with all kinds of my monte carlo explorations of statistical distributions, Pythagorean and binomial theorem solvers (with nifty walk-through of solution steps), trigonometric identity rules, run-off voting simulations (pick your favorite algorithm) and other ways to answer 8th to 12th grade math problems.
That conversation reminded me of an XKCD cartoon that I wanted to share with you:
(As usual with XKCD, the tooltip you get by leaving your mouse over the image is the best part of the comic.)
[1]Although this didn’t make me a card-counting genius or even really all that good at blackjack, it did introduce me to the first really interesting mathematical fact: the possible results of the RAND call were less than the possible results of 52!, and therefore it was important to pick each card via its own RAND call instead of using a single RAND call to specify a sorting.
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