In software development circles, I often encounter a sort of one-upmanship of difficulty. Who has written their program in the most painful, least assisted manner?
I can say without equivocation, I started with one of the hardest editors you can imagine. No auto-indent, no text coloring, not even an undo function. Yeah, that’s right, I wrote my first computer game on notebook paper.
Pause, please, for my gangster pose.
My husband was telling me today how he feels guilty when people ask how he got started in game design. “Why?” I asked.
“Because how I got started was to have parents who bought me a computer when I was eight with a book titled ‘how to program.'”
Brian can’t help that he was one of the few who were able to start programming back in the 1980s, but he’s aware it was an advantage, a head start on others.
What does this have to do with “doing it the hard way?” EVERYTHING. See, the hard way is often also the early way. The early way is closed to everyone not in the socio-economic class capable of taking advantage of cutting edge technologies. That game I wrote on notebook paper? I never got to type it in. The computer class was for one week, only, and though I begged, the school said they couldn’t let me back in the lab to try it out because there was no teacher who could supervise me.
Brian and I discovered a love of programming around the same age, but I wouldn’t get a chance to try it again until college, at which point he’d already written an operating system.
So when you complain/brag that you had to do things the hard way, it’s not just showcasing your endurance or whatever… it’s also highlighting your privilege.
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