Messing around with Decker and Twine is making me realize I don’t necessarily hate coding, I hate dealing with tables, arrays, matrices, and things like that.

20 years ago I got into a Computer Engineering major in a local college and, to be honest, it was quite alright. I was a good student and got good grades, but hated coding. I always liked the electronics classes more, where connecting chips and wires in a breadboard was cooler than typing. Most of my classmates thought the opposite: for them, coding — manipulating bits “without getting your hands dirty” — was a novelty. As for myself, I already had previous experience with it, as I studied in a technical school and learned to code in Clipper, Visual Basic, and Delphi, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

I don’t remember almost anything from that time, about how to do stuff, but I do remember I enjoyed making silly things with the software. When we got into databases, things were less fun, and when it was time to start manipulating data, I mostly zoned out. At college it was the same, but this time with C++.

It’s worth mentioning that things were a bit different back then: we still had to use serial ports for peripherals, there was no Raspberry Pi or Arduino, and you learned how to code by reading books and documentation, not tutorials. Much of the internet was still on dial-up, so access to information was harder. Unity would start to take its first steps around that time. I had the vague idea that I wanted to make games, but most kids growing up at that time, who had some contact with computers, thought the same. Not sure if things are still this way nowadays.

Making games was not my dream, though, just something I thought would be cool. I quickly dropped that idea after those C++ classes. I finished my first year and then changed major to Psychology (yeah…). I liked making computer programs that made things happen when interacted with, but I really did not enjoy dealing with data allocation, tables, and so on, and that’s like, essential, to make functional software, so instead of suffering through a career I was certain I wouldn’t like, I changed to another interest of mine (which I would change again a few years later, and keeping changing afterward…).

Now, having a somewhat stable life (whose life is truly stable nowadays anyway?), and being aware of newer and “easier to use” game engines for a few years, I decided to finally mess around with coding again. These engines do most of the parts I hate automatically, so I can focus on doing the parts I like. And well, would you look at that, I find it enjoyable to program something and see it reacting on the screen, even if it’s a simple Twine script going through different passages.

So, in the end, it’s not that I hate coding, but that I don’t derive pleasure in diving deeper than the surface level on it, unlike what happens with other stuff. Now, who knows, it feels like someday I’ll finally be able to manipulate data in a more meaningful way and do more complex stuff — Lil has been great at testing things around and providing instant feedback inside Decker, which encourages looking deeper into how it works, for example.

But I don’t think it will be anytime soon.