<commit_before>import { Article, CodeBlock, Link } from "../../../components/Article";

export const meta = {
  title: "The Language Journeyman: Learning 20+ languages in the last 20 years",
  date: "2017-11-22T07:09:32.191Z",
  tags: ["general"],
  description: "Article on the timeline and usage of various languages in the past",
}

export default () => {
  return (
    <Article {...meta}>
      <p>As a kid, during my school days, apart from English, I learnt 3 other languages with frequent alternations due to change of school, Govt. policies (I think), etc - Tamil (my native language), Hindi, and French - all of them half-baked, and now my French completely forgotten. Fortunately, I learned from my mistakes - from this point on, I always learned every language in great detail, trying to get a high level view of every semantic nuance before using it, but alas, I can't use them to speak to people - only to machine, through electronics and computer keyboards.</p>
  
      <p className="note">
        <strong>Note:</strong> This focuses largely on a walk down my childhood computing lane, and is a reflection of hopefully authentic understanding I had then. So if you’re looking for technical details, you may want to wait for the last part of my article - in which I hope to focus on my learnings from being a language journeyman, that hopefully helps you in making in the right language choices for the future.
      </p>
  
      <h2>The First Decade</h2>
      <h3>Language 1: BASIC (Year: 199x)</h3>
  
      <p>My uncle had gifted me with an educational tool in the 90s that used to have quizzes of English, Math, and BASIC. While I barely remember anything about the language today, I do remember the green colored laptop like plastic box with a keyboard and tiny display.</p>
      
      <p>BASIC, was my first computer language - giving me the ability to send commands through an electronic circuit and see the little rectangular gray blocks lighting up on that tiny display, that would form letters! As a kid, I was in awe.</p>
      
      <h3>Language 2: LOGO (Year: 199x)</h3>
      
      <p>If I remember correctly, one of the heads of my school, out of his own enthusiasm for computers, had set up this fascinating computer lab in school, with a few boxes of CRT monitors beaming electrons right at you - to me, staring at them were the most glorious time of my school life. To see those little blocks on the computer screen reacting to numerous directions you write. Again, barely remember anything about this time that was filled with magic and wizardry - but I do remember loving it.</p>
  
      <h3>Language 3: C (Year: Late 199x - Early 200x)</h3>
  
      <p>The first computer I ever had was a Compaq Presario! Looked exactly like this below.</p>
  
      <img className="img-fluid" src={require("./data/compaq.jpg")} alt="How my trusty Presario looked"/>
  
      <p>Sporting the fantastic JBL speakers, a fancy looking CPU case, 10GB HDD and Intel Pentium 3 - it was top notch! Overtime, I had reinstalled Windows 98 a bunch of times (a recovery CD came along and I had to find out what it did), meddled with the BIOS, and ordered <b>Ubuntu CDs online that would ship all the way from South Africa to suburban India for free</b> (though I had to jump through hoops to see an actual desktop on my PC).</p>
  
      <p>My clean install obsession aside, meddling further led me to C, and started writing simple C programs that would do basic math and crash in funny ways, and at times, even take the whole OS down with it. </p>
  
      <p className="note">
      This is the first real language that I brought upon myself to learn. Not sure how this journey really began to this day. Note,however, I ‘really’ learned C much later in life.
      </p>
  
      <h3>Language 4: HTML/CSS (Year: Early 200x)</h3>
  
      <p>I’m not sure if I even want to dedicate a section to HTML, but well, the <code>L</code> in HTML stands for Language, after-all. After being exposed to the web through the screeching modem sounds, I eventually started staying up all night (a trait I inherited proudly from my father who ran a clinic, and as such, was forced to stay up most of the night). But instead of saving lives - I’d go on to use <b>Google</b>, <b>AtlaVista</b> (heard of it?) and the likes, to learn all about computers, create a hundred email accounts (oh, yeah - not an exaggeration) to see which was the better one, and download massive, massive things like <b>RealPlayer</b>, and <b>MS SDKs</b> and <b>GNU source codes</b> - because <code>the internet was only free between 11pm to 4am in the morning</code> (And dial-up would use up the phone-line, and if I use it during the day, I’ll get yelled at from all directions). But I digress, this made me curious about the web, build basic websites, and learn HTML/CSS with just a little bit of JavaScript, and <code>had marquee carnival!</code> (You probably won’t get that metaphor unless you wrote web pages in the 90s or early 2000s)</p>
  
      <p className="note">
        As with C, I learnt the details of the DOM, CSSOM, and web rendering engine pipelines much later in life.
      </p>
  
      <h3>Language 5: Java  (Year: Early 200x)</h3>
  
      <p>Java, was a name that was all over computers at that time - even in suburban India. I would walk through the computer section in the biggest bookstore in the town, called <i>Eagle Book Centre</i> (It was nice to find out that it still exists), I’d see sections dedicated to just this thing called ‘Java’. And somehow, I convinced my grandfather that <b>I absolutely, positively needed to pick up the fattest book I had ever bought in my life</b>, and a very expensive one at that - Java something, with over 2000 pages. Everyone thought I was nuts!</p>
  <commit_msg>content: minor edits<commit_after>import { Article, CodeBlock, Link } from "../../../components/Article";

export const meta = {
  title: "The Language Journeyman: Learning 20+ languages in the last 20 years",
  date: "2017-11-22T07:09:32.191Z",
  tags: ["general"],
  description: "Article on the timeline and usage of various languages in the past",
}

export default () => {
  return (
    <Article {...meta}>
      <p>As a kid, during my school days, apart from English, I learnt 3 other languages with frequent alternations due to change of school, Govt. policies (I think), etc - Tamil (my native language), Hindi, and French - all of them half-baked, and now my French completely forgotten. Fortunately, I learned from my mistakes - from this point on, I always learned every language in great detail, trying to get a high level view of every semantic nuance before using it, but alas, I can't use them to speak to people - only to machine, through electronics and computer keyboards.</p>
  
      <p className="note">
        <strong>Note:</strong> This focuses largely on a walk down my childhood computing lane, and is a reflection of hopefully authentic understanding I had then. So if you’re looking for technical details, you may want to wait for the last part of my article - in which I hope to focus on my learnings from being a language journeyman, that hopefully helps you in making in the right language choices for the future.
      </p>
  
      <h2>The First Decade</h2>
      <h3>Language 1: BASIC (Year: 199x)</h3>
  
      <p>My uncle had gifted me with an educational tool in the 90s that used to have quizzes of English, Math, and BASIC. While I barely remember anything about the language today, I do remember the green colored laptop like plastic box with a keyboard and tiny display.</p>
      
      <p>BASIC, was my first computer language - giving me the ability to send commands through an electronic circuit and see the little rectangular gray blocks lighting up on that tiny display, that would form letters! As a kid, I was in awe.</p>
      
      <h3>Language 2: LOGO (Year: 199x)</h3>
      
      <p>If I remember correctly, one of the heads of my school, out of his own enthusiasm for computers, had set up this fascinating computer lab in school, with a few boxes of CRT monitors beaming electrons right at you - to me, staring at them were the most glorious time of my school life. To see those little blocks on the computer screen reacting to numerous directions you write. Again, barely remember anything about this time that was filled with magic and wizardry - but I do remember loving it.</p>
  
      <h3>Language 3: C (Year: Late 199x - Early 200x)</h3>
  
      <p>The first computer I ever had was a Compaq Presario! Looked exactly like this below.</p>
  
      <img className="img-fluid" src={require("./data/compaq.jpg")} alt="How my trusty Presario looked"/>
  
      <p>Sporting the fantastic JBL speakers, a fancy looking CPU case, 10GB HDD and Intel Pentium 3 - it was top notch! Overtime, I had reinstalled Windows 98 a bunch of times (a recovery CD came along and I had to find out what it did), meddled with the BIOS, and once Ubuntu released in 2004, ordered the very first versions of it online that would ship CDs all the way from South Africa to suburban India for free</b> (though I had to jump through hoops to see an actual desktop on my PC). I did, however stick to the Microsoft Ecosystem for a long time until Ubuntu 17.10.</p>
  
      <p>My clean install obsession aside, meddling further led me to C, and started writing simple C programs that would do basic math and crash in funny ways, and at times, even take the whole OS down with it. </p>
  
      <p className="note">
      This is the first real language that I brought upon myself to learn. Not sure how this journey really began to this day. However, I ‘really’ learned C much later in life.
      </p>
  
      <h3>Language 4: HTML/CSS (Year: Early 200x)</h3>
  
      <p>I’m not sure if I even want to dedicate a section to HTML, but well, the <code>L</code> in HTML stands for Language, after-all. After being exposed to the web through the screeching modem sounds, I eventually started staying up all night (a trait I inherited proudly from my father who ran a clinic, and as such, was forced to stay up most of the night). But instead of saving lives - I’d go on to use <b>Google</b>, <b>AtlaVista</b> (heard of it?) and the likes, to learn all about computers, create a hundred email accounts (oh, yeah - not an exaggeration) to see which was the better one, and download massive, massive things like <b>RealPlayer</b>, and <b>MS SDKs</b> and <b>GNU source codes</b> - because <code>the internet was only free between 11pm to 4am in the morning</code> (And dial-up would use up the phone-line, and if I use it during the day, I’ll get yelled at from all directions). But I digress, this made me curious about the web, build basic websites, and learn HTML/CSS with just a little bit of JavaScript, and <code>had marquee carnival!</code> (You probably won’t get that metaphor unless you wrote web pages in the 90s or early 2000s)</p>
  
      <p className="note">
        As with C, I learnt the details of the DOM, CSSOM, and web rendering engine pipelines much later in life.
      </p>
  
      <h3>Language 5: Java  (Year: Early 200x)</h3>
  
      <p>Java, was a name that was all over computers at that time - even in suburban India. I would walk through the computer section in the biggest bookstore in the town, called <i>Eagle Book Centre</i> (It was nice to find out that it still exists), I’d see sections dedicated to just this thing called ‘Java’. And somehow, I convinced my grandfather that <b>I absolutely, positively needed to pick up the fattest book I had ever bought in my life</b>, and a very expensive one at that - Java something, with over 2000 pages. Everyone thought I was nuts!</p>
  
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