Tim Bentley

TimBentley is a programmer currently working (in Australia) for a large American software company.

Tim taught himself to program whilst at school in the early eighties. He then went to university to study arts, only to stagger into the real world several years later and find himself working as a programmer. This turned out to be good from a career point of view, but he is still puzzled as to exactly how it happened.

Which languages did you teach yourself?

Started out with AppleSoft (an early MS influence!), writing code on cards as the school's sole Apple ][ was equipped with a mark-sense reader. Developed an irrational hatred for 2B pencils. Went on to do stuff in most flavours of micro-computer BASIC (Sinclair, Commodore, Tandy, Sharp pocket, etc.) current at the time. Dabbled in FORTH (on a ZX81!) and a very tiny amount of Z80 machine-code (found it too scary at the time - maybe an assembler would have helped).

It's interesting the different things that can be meant by 'self-taught'. Most of that early stuff really was self-taught - not many resources available, not many people available to ask, so lots of trial & error. However, when I recently 'taught myself' Java, I had an excellent reference (one of the O'Reilly books), access to expert help in the office and a fast link to the internet to find sample code and tips (oh, and a strong incentive to produce some working code very quickly!). Makes a huge difference.... --TimBentley

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