I still remember the excitement I felt when I wrote my first basic BBC Micro program at school. It was a simple four-line program that drew a triangle on the screen. In the early 1980s we enjoyed playing games like Chuckie Egg and the famous Granny’s Garden on the BBC Micro, which was the first computer we met, but the real thrill was getting the computer to perform tasks in the basic programming language. Simple programs that drew shapes or printed text on the screen weren’t exactly groundbreaking, but they were enough to whet my appetite for programming and set me on the path to programming games on other computers like the Spectrum, Atari ST, and Amiga.
In the old Spectrum days, you could buy magazines that featured games prewritten in basic code that you could write in your own Spectrum and hope the program would work just fine. This was a great way to learn how the code works and which commands do what. Books on basic programming were also released that would take you through the basics of commands and structure, and end up programming an entire game. The satisfaction of making things happen was incredible.
So what are the benefits of learning to program computers? In my personal experience, it gives you a sense of accomplishment to create an entire program from scratch and see it work. Figuring out how to get the computer to do something is challenging as you try to decide how you are going to do it. The emotion of being able to create your own game where you set the rules. The joy of other people playing it.
Programming is good for the mind as it involves problem solving. For example: how to make several sprites move around the screen and release bullets like in the famous game Space Invaders. What to do if a player does something unexpected and the game crashes, how to tell the computer how to deal with these unexpected events. I once spent over a week programming a zoom function in an art package I wrote, which gave me a huge sense of relief when I finally got it working.
Programming can also be a lot of fun and a great hobby. I met some good friends when I was writing programming tutorials for various Atari ST diskzines in the 1990s who I still hear from to this day. We sent each other disks full of programming tools and routines and longed for the many programs we could create where we were only limited by our imaginations. Our creations were reviewed in the main Amiga and ST magazines of the moment, something that we all expected.
Finally programming can become a good source of income for you. Creating your own shows can become a reality with the great programming languages available, like App Game Kit, which lets you create software that runs on multiple devices. People always want new software and employers need to find programmers to create it.
There are many game maker programs on the market that don’t require any programming, but I personally find them limiting. If you want to create your own games or apps, I highly recommend sticking with some good old-fashioned coding with one of the popular programming languages on the market today.
