Recently I was asked by my wife to look into creating a little application to create a schedule for a softball season. I had done a bunch of coding within SQL, but hadn’t used a true programming language for quite a while. Most of my experience was with procedural languages and not Object Oriented languages. To be honest, I’ve always felt that Object Oriented languages are a bit bloated and that functionality might not be required for all solutions. I feel this is one of those solutions.
So I tried to search out a new procedural language I could play with. When I went to University and was gainfully employed, I was using procedural languages. Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, Natural, and C were familiar to me. After doing some searching I eventually I found Go. It seems to have the right mix of formality and informality that I was looking for to code this type of solution. My requirements were also pretty basic to just do some calculations and generate pretty basic output. So I started to install the tools and I started to code.
Enjoyment
I really enjoyed the process of coding and the joy was not unlike my son and how he enjoys playing Minecraft. It was all about being able to create things.
When I code, I take great pleasure is being able to essentially create a mini-model of the world and to be able to get that world to operate like I require. It is a bit of a kick to be able to control exactly how the computer program runs and what behavior gets executed. Even if that something is rudimentary like a Fibonacci sequence or generating prime numbers. Being able to duplicate a structure from the real world is fun, challenging, and provides a real sense of accomplishment.
Of course I’m remembering only the good times of my relationship with coding. Like any old flame, I’m sure I am forgetting those long nights arguing for hours about an improperly typed variable that caused a strange bug. But I am going to try to see if some of that old spark remains.
On the plus side, the IDE interfaces make all the languages look young and robust. How could I resist?
Agile PMO 