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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: IF for Non-Programmers
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Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 03:30:38 GMT
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Jacqueline A. Lott <Jacqueline@MountainMemoirs.com> wrote:
>My previous programming experience?  None.  I wrote games in BASIC when I
>was ten [...],  but I don't consider [that] even close to
>"programming."

Hmm well. The important part of programming is really the "design"
component, expressing what you want to have happen and breaking
that into component pieces. Expressing it in a concrete language
and working around an existing library isn't really the hard part,
once you have the first skill. I would tend to expect that anything
really resembling a game (even 'pick a number from 1 to 100', if
you coded the program from scratch) even in BASIC would require
achieving that skill on some level; not sufficient to go
out and write DOOM, but plenty for most IF purposes.

This is not to say that I can't code circles around the me that
wrote BASIC twenty years ago--but rather that the process of being
confronted by a new problem and working out how to move forward on
it hasn't really changed.

SeanB
