Re: Where did you get your feet wet?

["Simon North" <Simon -dot- North -at- quintiq -dot- com>]

Lisa H said:
 > As an aside, I wonder how many writers in software documentation
were
 > former programmers who saw the light. Do let me know!

I started at University as a Fortran mainframe programmer (after
starting at hobby level with Commodore Basic and ZX Assembler), 
but never really got the hang of it (you could hear the giggles for
miles when I came to collect the reams of pages of output from 
my latest attempt to write a simple random number generator). However
... 

The first word processor I was introduced to (a Diamond 7) had a native
Pascal compiler running under CP/M and of course my boss 
figured I could write some programs in Pascal to do some interesting
stuff ... and ever since (apart from actually documenting 
programming languages) programming has been a pretty essential part of
my writing career. At first it was things like trying to 
get IBM DisplayWrite (EBCDIC) to print correctly justified text on an
HP LaserJet (at a time when HP refused to released any details 
at all about their Printer Control Language), to typesetting in TeX
(try MetaFont for some real fun), and then in later years to using 
languages to automate documentation tasks: Lisp, Perl, Python, Rebol,
and documentation delivery: JavaScript, Java, ASP, PHP and 
XSLT. And of course there are also the documentation projects where
they expect you to become familiar enough with the code and 
application to be able to do things for yourself, such as write your
own examples, so over the years I've learned to hack in C, C++, C#, 
C--, Ada, RTL, Modula2 and 3, Prolog, Verilog, SystemC, SystemVerilog
... and a whole stable of others. 

So, I'm sort of the other side of the coin, a software tech writer who
has found to necessary to become a programmer. I wonder how many 
of those there are as I'm sure I'm not the only one. 

Simon North. 

 

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