We believe in underpromising and overdelivering, and this occasion is no different: When you finish reading this guide, you will not be a programmer. What you WILL get is a good overview of where to start learning about programming, the languages involved and the best ways to go about getting your feet wet.
Back in the old days, when we were mere babes in the computer lab, you would program a computer a couple of ways.
PROGRAMMING IN THE OLDEN DAYS
1. Punch Cards
2. Typing commands onto a teletype, which would then spit back your results about a half an hour later, and if there was a typo, well, that was another hour of your life you weren't going to get back.
3. Assembly Language (You don't even want to know.)
Then, lo and behold, the personal computer was born and suddenly, you could make it do things using a relatively simple set of commands. The first environments were BASIC for the PC home user, along with HyperCard for Apple.
BASIC
With BASIC, you would write something like this:
This would print "I love Usher" forever, or until you stopped the program. The second line (20) tells the computer to go back to (GOTO) the first line (10). Since there's no "stop" command, it would do this over and over again.
BASIC was (and still is) what is known as a procedural language. Why is it called procedural? Because you create a process--a step-by-step series of commands (e.g., PRINT, GOTO, WHILE...DO)--for the computer to execute.
HYPERCARD
HyperCard was a GUI (Graphical User Interface). Instead of using verbal commands (i.e., words) to tell the computer what to do, you would arrange visual elements--buttons, fields for text and other widgets on a screen. Each of these "objects" was assigned a set of behaviors and attributes. This type of approach eventually became known as "object-oriented" programming.
But enough with the walk down memory lane...
