Change That Isn't Change
C omputers have changed significantly over the years. When I was a kid, we had a computer at home, but most of my friends didn’t. These days, people carry more computing power around in their pockets than we had available to us on our computer. Back then, people were convinced that they would lose their jobs to a computer. Today, most people wouldn’t know how to do their job if they didn’t have a computer. But there are also many ways that computers have stayed the same. For all the improvements we’ve seen in computers, the job for the man behind the curtain hasn’t changed all that much. When I was a kid, I was using BASIC to program the TRS-80. The Commodore 64s also used a form of BASIC. Later, when I went to college, I began to learn other languages. We started out with Modula-2, then it was C, a slew of other languages and before I graduated I had learned C++ and Java. There are even more languages today, but one thing I’ve learned is that computer languages are very similar to e...