“Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.” — Russell Simmons

My first real language was Pascal. My first few programs were written in Basic, but even then it felt like a toy language. Many of the techniques that I learned from Basic applied directly to Pascal though — control structures like loops, conditional statements, operator precedence and so on. Just like mathematics is built upon fundamental axioms like the Well-ordering principle, programming is built upon these fundamental techniques. They’re constant, they don’t vary from language to language. (more…)