Or my favorite quote from the article

“I am going to have a complete and total mental breakdown. I am going to be institutionalized. They are going to put me in a padded room and I am going to write… code on the walls with my own feces,” it said.

    • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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      3 hours ago

      I did a Dr Mario clone around that age. I had an old Amstrad CPC I had grew up with typing listing of basic programs and trying to make my own. I think this was the only functional game I could finish, but, it worked.

      Speed was tied to CPU, I had no idea how to “slow down” the game other than making it do useless for loops of varying sizes… Max speed that was about comparable to Game Boy Hi speed was just the game running as fast as it could. Probably not efficient code at all.

    • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      High five, me too!

      At that age I also used to do speed run little programs on the display computers in department stores. I’d write a little prompt welcoming a shopper and ask them their name. Then a response that echoed back their name in some way. If I was in a good mood it was “Hi [name]!”. If I was in a snarky mood it was “Fuck off [name]!” The goal was to write it in about 30 seconds, before one of the associates came over to see what I was doing.

      • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        7 hours ago

        me and my friend used to make them all the time :] i also went to summer computer camp for basic on old school radio shack computers :3