print "Hello World!"

A brief history of my (extremely limited) computer programming experience:

My very first experience (somewhere between 1982 and 1985) was on a Commodore Vic20 making a little stick figure do jumping jacks (I think that was probably in BASIC, but I can't be sure). I was still very young and didn't have the patience to do much more than that.

Sometime around 5th grade (1985), there was a (mostly unused) computer in our classroom that had the LOGO programming language...you know, the one with the turtle...forward 50, right turn 45, forward 50, etc. If that doesn't sound familiar, don't worry about it.

Although I played on computers, I didn't have much interest in programming for quite a few years.

It wasn't until somewhere in 1994-1996 that I started teaching myself HTML...okay, that's a markup language and not a programming language, but my experience is so limited that I'm going to count it anyway.

I took a few college classes to learn the BASIC programming language. It wasn't much, but I finally began to understand that I could actually do something with programming. However, BASIC wasn't powerful enough to do much, and I really didn't have the desire to delve into anything more complicated.

This past week, I bought myself a book on the Python programming language...and I love it. I'm not very far along in the book, but I've already started building a little project of my own. It reminds me of the simplicity of BASIC, but is much, much more versatile, and from what I understand it is used by a lot of big name companies.

Now, I'm not kidding myself into thinking I'll get back into the computer field and actually use this stuff. I'm just interested in seeing how it all works and slop together a few programs that would interest me (making utilities for various offline games). It's just a hobby. My first project is developing a little program to help run a game called En Garde! Actually, I've put together an variant called Thyatis En Garde! that is based in my favorite D&D campaign world.

I realize there are kids half my age (17...egad) who could program circles around me, but that doesn't bother me at all. I'm just in it for fun, not for profit.