Half-life

It just occurred to me that by now I have spent more than half my life so far with programming (in the loosest sense of the word, probably more like "thinking in algorithms").

If all goes well, the next half will be spent with programming, too.

If this doesn't change the neural connections, then I don't know what could.

(... I still remember very clearly how arrays confused me back in highschool times... using DIM in QBasic in MS-DOS 5.0 - how could many values be stored under the same name? I chose to ignore pointers back then.

It was awesome that some fellow highschool students were actually able to use TurboPascal's "GUI" units.

Later came the magic of callback functions (with pointers!) in C, when programming the Schroeder 2 in XForms (which still look as fugly as they did back a decade(!) ago) kept us awake.

OOP in Java (brand-new back then, a year or two later; I actually ordered a CD-ROM with something like an "IBM WebSphere Java Developer Kit" through mail) was a relief.

Also, I remember vividly how at the turn of the millenium I learned C++ from what is probably the least appropriate tool - Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language.

All of this happened before the Internet happened in the way I use it for programming today, which means all of this was harder (which means one actually looked up the parameters for printf() in a book).

Still, I grew up in the era after GOTO.)