About
Welcome to Elegant Programming, a blog dedicated to programming as an art.
This site is operated by Scott Thomason. I’ve been a programmer since 1980. The first computer I ever used was an IBM System/3, which had 16K of RAM–not gigabytes, not megabytes, but kilobytes, a whopping 16,384 bytes of memory. All our data entry was done on punched cards–no terminals on that computer. I learned assembler, COBOL, and RPG II on that machine. Groan.
Later in life I would pick up an assortment of other languages, some of which you may have never heard of: QBASIC, Rexx, HyperCard, SAS, M:SDT, Natural. Things that aren’t quite programming languages like CLIST, JCL, SQL, HTML, sh. More recently I’ve learned Perl and Visual Basic .NET pretty well. I know enough Java and Javascript to get by. I’m working on Python and C#. I suppose I’ll have to learn PHP since this is a WordPress site (but I don’t like the looks of it). Someday I’d like to take a look at Ruby.
I’ve always loved programming as a craft, and this website is for people who feel the same way. I hope you like it.
—scott
