The Frankenstein Moment

My very first program was written in GW-BASIC and did a very simple thing.

You could enter your name and it would respond with a greeting:

What is your name? Nicolo
Hello Nicolo!

Even this trivial program contained something that I cherish in code that I write today: the fact that your creation seems to be alive and respond in ways that are dependent on external input.

This is not a thrill that is exclusively enjoyed by programmers. There are a lot of things that we do on a regular basis that are in fact programming (they just don’t involve writing code).

Setting your oven to turn off automatically after 30 minutes is a form of programming. So is an Excel formula or playing Factorio.

My latest project Board Game Lab is an attempt to allow people with no programming experience to express the rules of their board game to a platform (without writing code) in order to have it be played by bots (this is useful for playtesting your game before you get it in front of human players).

More Frankenstein moments for all!