In an emergency, this user may be slapped with a trout.
This user believes that process is important on Wikipedia and is opposed to its circumvention.
Like a lot of other people on the Web, I started off programming in high school. Unlike a lot of other people on the Web, that was in 1977, before most of them were born.
I learned BASIC on a machine that looked like a typewriter, which was connected via an incredibly slow line to a mainframe several miles away. I found that programming came easily to me and when I realized that I could get paid good money for solving puzzles, a light went on and I said, "This is for me!"
So far as web programming goes, I was mostly in the right place at the right time. I first got online in the early 1990s, as was normal for a computer geek. In the mid-'90s Java and JavaScript came along and they just looked really, really easy to someone who had been programming as long as I had. At that same point I was completely fed up with my dead-end mainframe programming job and was looking for something different, so I jumped ship in 1996 and taught myself rudimentary HTML, Java, and JavaScript.
What I found was that what came so easily to me wasn't quite so easy to non-programmers, and I started teaching classes. I then realized that understanding concepts and being able to explain those same concepts to non-technical people are two very different beasts and that while lots of people can do the former, not so many can do the latter. The same light that had gone on in 1977 went on again in 1997 and I switched gears and changed over to primarily write and teach about web programming.
According to Wikipedia's own guidelines, I qualify as someone who should have an entry (given a couple of best-selling books), but I don't (and do not want one). On the other hand, after more looking around, I was stunned by the number of topics (mostly people) that don't have WP articles; enough so that I started a list. I would be happier if that list was shorter.
