Aimlessly Going Forward

thoughts by Tomas Sedovic

It’s better to go aimlessly forward than to aimlessly stand still — not to mention aimlessly going backwards.

Hey There!

Photo of Tomas Sedovic

I’m Tomáš Šedovič (IPA: /tɒmɑːʃ ʃɛdɒvɪtʃ/). I live in Brno, Czechia and I’m a 26 years old pro­gram­mer.

You can reach me via e-mail: tomas@​sedovic.​cz, Google+ or twit­ter.

I al­so hap­pen to have a GitHub ac­count.

How I Got Started

Photo of Atari 800XL computer

My first com­put­er was Atari 800 XL. We got it as a gift from par­ents’ friends be­cause we couldn’t af­ford a “re­al” com­put­er. It was around 1999 and I was 13.

Dad hooked it up to a TV, boot­ed up to the BASIC prompt and us­ing print he made two pic­tures of a bird in­side a goto loop. Then he typed run and the bird start­ed fly­ing.

I was ab­solute­ly stunned and im­me­di­ate­ly want­ed to learn this. Soon enough, I was both­er­ing every mem­ber of my fam­i­ly with the an­i­ma­tions I had made (call­ing them “pro­grams”).

Sad­ly, Dad’s knowl­edge didn’t go much fur­ther and the on­ly oth­er avail­able re­source was 800 pages man­u­al in Ger­man (which none of us spoke). Luck­i­ly, it had code ex­am­ples.

So I typed them in, checked what they did, mod­i­fied some of the val­ues and even­tu­al­ly fig­ured out what all the weird words (it’s spelled “colour” not “col­or” you sil­ly com­put­er) were sup­posed to do.

And that’s how I learned BASIC — my first pro­gram­ming lan­guage. Eds­ger Dijk­stra would say that it mu­ti­lated my mind be­yond re­cov­ery.

He would be right.