June 2019
Intermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h
English
I vividly remember the first time I wrote code. I was 10 years old and utterly obsessed with robots. The local public library must have lent me every book they had on the subject. One of those books had an appendix: “Write Your Own Robot in BASIC.” I ran to my parents’ computer, fired up qbasic (bundled with the cutting-edge MS-DOS operating system), and fed in the instructions for my robot companion.
The program was unimpressive by today’s standards. It was a primitive version of what we would now call a “chatbot.” It would give you a prompt like
| | >>> Greetings, human. How are you feeling today? |
then wait for you to enter a recognizable string like tired, and give an appropriate response like
| | >>> I am sorry to hear that. How about ... |
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