The Epic Saga of Programming: From Punching Holes to Chatting with Bots
andre
Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts and casual scrollers. Ever wondered how we went from fiddling with wires on room-sized machines to telling a computer “make me a cat video generator” and watching it happen? This post is a breezy skip through the history of programming—evolution on fast-forward, with more bugs (the code kind) than the creepy-crawly kind. I’ll keep it light and skip the jargon; by the end you might even chuckle at us all turning into lazy overlords of silicon.
The beginning: the dawn of computers. Massive beasts that could heat your house in winter. They were programmed in the rawest way—microcode. That’s writing instructions straight for the hardware, like whispering to a circuit board. No screens, no keyboards; just machine-speak. Like teaching a rock to dance by chiselling moves into it. Exhausting, but it worked for anyone willing to spend days on what we’d do in seconds.
Next, assembly. The first real instruction sets. Suddenly you had mnemonics instead of raw binary—“ADD”, “JMP” (jump). A real leap. People got good at it. I had a programmable calculator with 99 steps; it felt like a pocket grimoire. Punch in the commands, run it, watch it chug through maths. We were assembly ninjas, flipping bits like pancakes.
Then high-level languages: Fortran, COBOL, C. You could write logic in a more natural way, like a recipe. “If this, then that”—done. The code still had to be compiled or assembled into machine code, and you still had to babysit: allocate memory, clean up. Forget to free RAM and you got memory leaks; your program turned into a digital hoarder. Fun times.
Computers shrank to desks, then laps, then pockets. Memory and disk went from puny kilobytes to gigabytes. Programs ballooned from a few KB to megabytes (some apps are now gigabyte hogs for cat memes). People forgot the basics. “MOV” in assembly? That’s “move data”. Now folks say “move what—my mouse?” The old ways feel like hieroglyphs.
Languages kept coming, each more pampering: Java, Python, JavaScript. They manage memory for you and ship with huge libraries. Want to send data over the net? There’s a module. Your code often becomes bytecode, then gets JIT-compiled to machine code. Like ordering takeout instead of cooking every byte yourself. Programming got within reach of more people.
Then AI crashed the party. It speaks human. You can chat in plain English (or whatever) and get code—e.g. Java—that compiles to bytecode and runs. Like a genie with unlimited tweaks. I’ve had it spit out a simple game; it did, bugs included. The barrier to entry? Gone. Anyone can “program” if they can string a sentence together.
Crystal ball: in maybe ten years, only a few people on the planet might write a basic “Hello, Meatpuppet” from scratch without AI. (Meatpuppet because “World” is so nineties and we’re all fleshy puppets in this dance.) The rest of us? Dictating to our AI overlords over coffee. Computer engineers could go the way of typewriter repairmen. Job ad: “Wanted: human who remembers what a pointer is. Must bring own abacus.” We’ll look back and laugh that we used to type code.
This shift isn’t all roses. Hand over the reins and the AI can get it wrong—or worse, who knows. On the upside, it democratises tech. Kids might never learn assembly but they’ll still build world-changing apps. Lazy-genius territory.
So what’s the takeaway? From microcode masochism to AI-assisted bliss, we’ve made tech more human-friendly at each step. Ingenuity plus love of shortcuts. Feeling nostalgic? Dust off an old calculator and those 99 steps—or ask your phone’s AI to do it. Either way, the change is coming whether we code it or not.