Why Programming?

I don’t code much these days - AI does all the programming for me. I almost exclusively write programs in Python, and I do not like Python.

The first programming language I learned was C. This was before the internet. I had two textbooks titled something like “Learning C” and “Graphics with C”. I read the books, did the exercises on my yellow-blue Turbo C compiler. I wrote Winamp visualizations and terminal-based games. It was a lot of fun. Later, when I discovered the web browser and learned HTML and its siblings, I was able to express my creative self through coding.

While I did all of this for fun, looking back, programming helped me become a better thinker. It taught me to break down a complex problem into smaller parts and work on the parts systematically. Now, from my vantage point as a teacher, I can say that programming was cross-training for math. In my mind the two are so enmeshed that I do not think of them as separate topics.

This is what we’re losing as we transition to vibe coding.