Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…Do you remember what you wrote in BASIC? Is it a video game type thing? Is it like for loop, some numerical thing? Do you remember? Yeah, it’s funny. I have a perfectly vivid memory of all of the first things I learned to program. I have a hard time remembering people’s names, but code really sticks with me. Every step and every challenge, there were lessons learned, some of which I’ve come to realize were just like me getting over some learning hurdles. But other things were actually shortcomings of programming languages and the realization that there are actually better ways than what a programmer is learning to program for their first time. A lot of what they’re facing isn’t the challenge of learning a new art. It’s friction introduced by failures of programming language design. And so I’ve constantly come back to those early lessons there as I’ve progressed and done more and more things including building programming languages. Yeah, the friction and the pain is the guide to learning in programming. If I were to describe programming journey that’d be marked by pain and that pain, you shouldn’t escape the pain. The pain is instructive for you to understand programming languages. But do you remember what kind of stuff you were writing at that time? Just the early programs?…

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