My first contact with programming

I've always been fascinated by technology since when I was a kid and my dad bought a desktop computer kit just like this one:

Since then, I've never stopped using the computer. I would download several games (and some viruses as well 🤦‍♂️) and make the computer really slow. I got familiar with all the tools on the computer: Microsoft Office, Adobe applications and etc.

Very quickly, I became extremely tech-savvy.

My first contact with programming was when I started playing Minecraft and started building servers to play with my friends. There was a plugin called skript that allowed you to create new features for your server, and the syntax was very natural, basically plain English:

# In this example the player trades 2 gold nuggets for 1 bread

on right click:
    block is a sign
    line 1 of sign is "[Shop]"
    player has permission "Skript.shop"
    player has 2 gold nuggets
    remove 2 gold nuggets from player
    give player 1 bread
    message "You bought a bread."

So I would create several scripts for my servers and automate everything. This was simpler than creating server plugins with Java, but was enough to make me get comfortable with the logics of programming.

At the time I thought Java was too hard for me to learn and that might be the reason that now, almost 10 years later, I chose to learn Java as my first programming language. I've spent the past years studying it, and turns out it isn't that hard. 😅