PhilsProgrammingHistory

Quora Answer : What was your first programming project that wasn't mandatory?

Jul 5, 2015

I was writing programs long before anyone was obliging me to.

I started by making variants on a version of Space Invaders that my mother wrote for me in TRS-80 Basic. Then there were a few more games I tried to write from scratch : a kind of basketball that was like a two player Breakout; a weird game where you flew a bird around, leaving buckets in the air to catch raindrops; a sort of Nintendo "Game and Watch" type game using a boat to ferry people across a river. And then I saw a TV program with some AI stuff in Prolog and I thought I could try to do something similar. That was a particularly classic non-event, as I had no idea how Prolog acutally worked and was just fumbling around trying to hack an AI in Basic.