A long time back, browsing through a book, I came across code for strcpy function which is part of the standard library in C:
strcpy(char *s1,char *s2)
{
while (*s1++ = *s2++)
}
Just the beauty of the code made me fall in love with C and programming all
over again. Then, I got busy with courses, jobs, projects and releases.
Recently, an article bubbled up in delicious popular that caught my eye: Why I Don’t Mind Maintenance Programming
As the author notes, almost every developer wants to work on a new project. So much so that, it is invariably brought up in job interviews either by companies to sell their position or by candidates trying to decide whether to take up an offer. I was no different when I graduated from college and was duly disappointed when couple of months into my first job I realized I would be doing maintenance of several legacy systems. Only later did I realize the whole lot of good that it did to me:
My wife once told me about her first lecture in Computer Science back in her college days. The teacher walked in and started talking about history of computers, data, files, computer languages and “lots of other hyperbole”. She didn’t understand anything out of the one hour lecture. Soon after that, she switched to Political Science.
I have heard similar stories of people getting a rough introduction to computers. That got me thinking about how I got introduced to computers. I remember in my very first class (I was 12 then), my teacher Mr. Jhulan Chakraborty started by explaining what a computer is. What he said, stayed with me ever since:
File Format is a way of putting your software application’s data into
a file on the disk when you do a save.
