Why my first program was a piano

My brother had a PC. I didn't. This is the foundational fact.

It was 1996, maybe 1997. He was in an engineering college, the PC ran Windows 95, the keyboard had Hindi stickers stuck on top of the QWERTY keys because that's what dads did with PCs in 1996. We didn't have internet. We had a stack of computer magazines bought from a neighbourhood stall and a 14-inch CRT monitor with screen-burn from leaving it on too long.

I was 15. I wanted to know what the keyboard could do.

The magazine had a code listing — six pages of FoxPro — that promised, if you typed it correctly, that you could press keys on the QWERTY and hear piano notes through the PC speaker. I had seen a piano twice in my life. I had no opinion on FoxPro. I had nowhere else to be on a Sunday.

I typed it.

I typed it twice, actually, because the first attempt had a typo three pages in and the program refused to compile. The error message was something like 'syntax: line 87.' I didn't know what syntax was, line 87 was, or why the computer was upset. I started again from the top.

The second time it worked. C major was the H key. F major was the L key. (Or near enough — the Hindi stickers obscured a lot.) For about ninety minutes I tortured the family with a single octave.

What I learned, and have never stopped learning

• —Most of programming is typing things you don't fully understand and seeing what happens.
• —Magazines were just a worse, slower internet, and they were excellent.
• —The error message is almost always trying to help you. You just don't speak its language yet.
• —If you can get something to work once, you can get it to work twice. After that, you can change it.

Twenty-five years later, I'm still mostly typing things I don't fully understand and seeing what happens. The magazines have been replaced by Stack Overflow, then by GitHub, now by an LLM that occasionally hallucinates the answer with great confidence. The medium is different. The exercise is the same.

The piano works on a 5-key span if you use the home row. I can still play Twinkle Twinkle. Don't ask me to do anything more than that.