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  "path": "/maybe-programming-just-isnt-for-me/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-30T18:34:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://blog.spu.io",
  "tags": [
    "You Don't Want to Make Things, You Want to Have Made Things",
    "discipline"
  ],
  "textContent": "My first computer was a Commodore 128D, a successor to the Commodore 64. It had different modes you could boot into, but I almost exclusively used the C64 mode, so basically I had a C64 in a much less iconic form factor. The “D” stands for desktop - it was basically just one of those typical grey 80s/90s computer boxes, mostly indistinguishable from any IBM PC at the time.\n\nI spent a lot of time playing on that machine and I was also interested in doing more with it than just playing. I didn’t have the internet or any idea how anything like that would work, beyond having seen War Games. A lot. Fortunately one day an older cousin of mine gifted me a used BASIC programming book (I think he found in the trash, or something.)\n\nNow this was very exciting for pre-teen me and I soon got to work typing in the first program. Going by the description and illustration it was going to be a bouncing ball. Nothing too fancy, and, oh boy, that looks like a lot of code already, but you gotta start somewhere.\n\nSo I typed all that in, all the many lines of code, or what seemed like a lot to me and seemed to take forever aaaaand then… nothing.\n\nNothing happened. Maybe there was an error message, I don’t remember exactly, but no bouncy ball.\n\nAnd my code, all that hard work, was gone. And I had no idea how to get it back besides typing it all in again. That’s when I decided programming probably wasn’t for me.\n\nI guess this is very similar to the thing described in You Don't Want to Make Things, You Want to Have Made Things the other day, that just because someone likes playing games they might not enjoy making them.\n\nNow what exactly went wrong I couldn’t tell you. Did I make a typo? (Probably the most likely explanation.) Did the book have one? (Also not uncommon back then.) Did I in my excitement skip to the first program and missed the part that would have told me how to get my work back? (I guess in this case discipline would have been NOT skipping the intro.) Did the author want to get you coding first before going over the boring details of saving and I just never made it that far? Was the book even for Commodore BASIC or some other dialect? I wouldn’t have known BASIC had dialects, neither would my cousin. Did he find it because it was indeed trash?\n\nThat book got thrown out decades ago, so we’ll never know, but sometimes I am reminded of this experience and wish it would have gone differently. Would be interesting to revisit this old, German programming book some day, but I'm not even sure I'd recognize it if I saw it.\n\n* * *\n\nPrevious Next\n\n* * *",
  "title": "Maybe Programming Just Isn’t For Me",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-30T18:34:03.975Z"
}