@podfeet @atpfm I wholeheartedly agree. Though I’m a mechanical engineer, I had plenty of programming instruction along the way. I first learned QuickBASIC on Mac SE’s in 1994 in high school. This got me programming in QuickBASIC on our IBM 386 at home. I taught myself VisualBASIC to write Excel macros for my dad during a summer job after graduation.

We were taught C my freshman year of college (1995), and to @caseyliss’s point: “What the hell is a pointer?!?” (I didn’t really understand until grad school) All of our assignments were done on the department server where we all had accounts.

Later, we did tons of programming in MATLAB for all of the matrix operations to solve robotics positioning problems.

In grad school, I had to learn C++ on the fly from a previous student’s research with genetic algorithms. This led to me taking my first actual CS course (400 level) where I was the only non-CS student in a class on evolutionary computation. There was no restriction on language, but I was stuck with C++. Those “kids” could program circles around me.

Now, many years later, I mostly write Python so I can make my own macros for my CAD software and other goofy projects. All along the way has been sprinklings of HTML/CSS for various web projects.

I say all of this because listening to this episode really made me take stock of how much programming exposure I’ve had over the last 30 years, even though it’s not my primary job function. I was so happy to hear how much my experience paralleled @siracusa’s, absorbing everything I could in the computer labs where I probably spent too many late nights… 😂