Misanthropy

Why I don’t really program anymore..

I started programming when I was in 7th or 8th grade on my own. I talked to my old man about he mentioned something about GW Basic (He’s an electrical engineer and ASM wiz) so I started looking over the books and I said, “this is nonsense, I’m not gonna waste my time learning this language” so I went and learned C from scratch, on my own which shifted over to C++ and Visual C in the later years.

This was back in 1993/1994, shortly before Windows 95 came out and vanquished DOS and Windows 3.11. At its core, this is what stopped me from wanting to program. I didn’t switch over to Windows 98 until about ‘99, grudgingly I might add.

Windows programming is so annoying and bloated and you lack something that you have in DOS:

Total power, control, and design. For example, I single-handedly wrote, for DOS, my own encryption program which featured a file manager, mouse support, and drag and drop, all in a non GUI interface. Other things I’ve written include my own ANSi sequence decoders along with file managers kind of like those old school ACiD Viewer programs, some database stuff, a lot of file manipulation programs, useful utilities, BBs door games and some MMPORG, well it was actually only 1 user but it was modeled entirely after a famous one online(text only)

Windows has a lot of the basics done for programming such as inherent mouse support, pre-created file manager libraries, etc. It’s still a pain in the ass to do GUI programming, you modify this code here then you need to modify the interface, etc. Also, every program in Windows looks the same, stupid goddamn dialog boxes. I know you can skin shit but in the end it’s still all the same. DOS was different. You created the interface; you had to learn all the direct video writes for optimized speed, controlling the RGB palette, etc. You could so some pretty neat things.

I suppose in the end, the whole reason I dropped out of programming is partially due to burn out and lack of need to occupy myself, but also largely in part due to the death of DOS. I just don’t have the fun with Windows when coding as I did in DOS.