Programming

I've been thinking about my experiences with programming lately. Working with bash scripting has brought up a lot of memories of first learning to program in BASIC. There is something in working with bash that strongly gives off the feel, the character, that I remember BASIC having. In some ways, I find it very like meeting an old friend from my childhood, with both of us now grown up and able to interact on deeper levels. I am enjoying the feeling immensely.

That said, something seems missing. Not in the scripting language itself; which, while possessing some odd ideosyncracies I have yet to grow used to, I find little problem with. More in the culture surrounding it, I suppose.

When I first started learning BASIC, I was given a few books on the subject. These books were not tutorials, they were not geared at learning to program. They were, essentially, listings. Page after page of pre-made example programs. They were my building blocks. Whenever I wanted to do something in BASIC, I would find an analogous situation in one of the programs in those books, see how it was implimented there, and adapt the solution to my own purposes. Everything from hang-man to blackjack to programs to quiz you on foreign language vocabulary. And yes, most of them were games or other programs meant to entertain, but IMO that added to their accessability. You could learn programming concepts while having fun, rather than having to learn pure theory or practical application right off the bat.

I haven't seen that in other programming languages. I've seen books with example code, but almost invariably it's for some dull program like a text editor or a simplified web browser or some accounting bullshit. And the quantity is not even remotely the same... books I've seen on programming in C or C++ or objective-C have maybe two dozen rather dull programs in them tops. The old BASIC books easily had fifty, possibly a hundred, interesting and FUN programs in them as I recall. I really wish I had saved mine, I'd be going through them now and porting them line by line into other languages. I don't even know what happened to those books at this point, though I miss their loss sorely.

So far as I have been able to tell, bash scripting shares this deficiency. I'm not finding websites that have a ton of example scripts, let alone simple game scripts, saved on them. Maybe they exist somewhere, but as yet I haven't found them. Beyond a few dry tutorials, though, and the rare site that houses a handful of examples, it seems like people have neglected this side of bash scripting. Maybe it's seen as too childish or something, I dunno. Maybe there's a vast treasure trove of it out there I haven't found yet. I'll keep looking, and if I don't find them I'm damned well gonna write some now. Wait and see.