Coding, Knitting and War

A beginners journey to coding from the perspective of a knitter and medievalist.

I have been writing code for almost as long as I can remember. It is hard to get a sense of exactly what it feels like to start from scratch learning. Especially today. I began coding at a time when Amiga Basic and 68k assembly was still a thing. The internet and the web was an unknown thing to most of us at the time. Coding was something I learned from various outdated books from the local library, a manual that came with my Amiga 1000 and numerous computer magazines from the local newsstand.

As someone interested in how you teach and inspire people to code, it has been interesting to observe my wife’s journey into coding. She does not have the typical coder background. Her master degree was in medieval studies with focus on heraldry. However there is some overlap in that she loves languages, and speaks quite a number of them. One should not forget that at least one famous programming language creator Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, is a trained linquist:

Wall’s training as a linguist is apparent in his books, interviews, and lectures. He often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl’s design with linguistic rationale. He also often uses linguistic terms for Perl language constructs…