My Journey was quite weird. It all started when I was 9 year old and I was watching some cartoon named ‘Chotta Bheem’. My father just came into the room and spoke up ‘You are not going to learn anything from this silly cartoon’. By-the-way, he is a Computer Engineer from IIT. So back to the topic, he just picked up the TV remote and switched off the cartoon. I was really furious at that time. He said come with me to my laptop. I said in a low voice though I was furious ‘Ok papa’. I went there to his laptop and he said that ‘You should learn coding’. I at the very first moment was speechless thinking ‘What the heck is CODING?’ Then I asked him ‘What is coding?’ and he responded that ‘Like we speak English and Hindi, computers also have their own language. By coding we make the computer do certain tasks for us. Like we have these apps twitter, facebook, instagram etc. They all are built by coding only.’ At the first moment I was really excited and the first thought that came to my mind was ‘I can make twitter, instagram and facebook if I learn coding, coding must be so cool, I could make it big if I learn coding’. I was jumping here and there and spoke loudly ‘Yes!!! I want to learn CODING!!!’.
My father was happy to see me interested in coding. He said ‘Then ok, let’s see a youtube video on which programming language is best for beginners’. Again I was speechless thinking ‘How many languages can a computer understand’. And I asked my father a question that ’How many languages can a computer understand?’. He replied ‘About hundreds or may be thousands (Notice: Here we are saying that computer can understand thousands of languages though computer can only understand 1 language that is binary but we code in higher level languages.)’. I was shocked! Every computer can understand about a thousand languages but that human who made this computer can only understand 2 or 3 languages. Then we searched on youtube ‘Which coding language is the best for beginners’. There came lots of videos like Top 3 programming languages, Top 5 programming languages and all but I liked a video on JavaScript and it’s thumbnail was also really stylish. I convinced my father to play that video and he did because he knew JavaScript was one of the best languages and he wanted my interest to keep growing though I did not know anything about coding so he played the video and the person in it said to code in Firefox. I didn’t know what was Firefox and forced my father to install that web browser though we had Google Chrome but I always thought that the video was correct. We were trying to install Firefox again and again but it gave some issues and about 2 or 3 hours later it had completely installed. I was really excited and in that video they said to press F12 to open the console of the browser. We pressed it and the console was opened. Then that person told us to write our first command that was alert(‘Hello World’) and I was jumping on my seat hoping to see this command create facebook for me and I asked my father ‘Papa, will this command create facebook for me???’. And then he laughed out loud (LOL) and said ‘No, just wait and see’. I was quite happy and quite sad also thinking that I will not be able to make facebook from this command and maybe I will create instagram or twitter from it. I wrote the command in the console and I was shocked!!!! It literally just brought a small popup in which there was written ‘Hello World’ and there was an OK button. I still had hopes that if I press the OK button then it will create twitter or instagram for me but after hitting OK it did not do anything. I asked my father ‘What will this do for us???’. I was still very excited because my father had mentioned that I can make social networking sites from coding but I thought it would happen from only 1 line of code. I then thought that it was so foolish of me to think that I could make social networking sites from only 1 command and if that was possible then everybody would have done it. My father replied to my question ‘Saion, this is used for lots of things, for example if you ask for an email id from a user and he just inputs an invalid email id then we can alert him that he has entered a wrong email id’. I was speechless thinking it is so useful and then I said ‘Oh!!! WOW!!!’. Then we did our second command that was prompt(‘Hi’) and it also brought a popup but with an input field. I asked my father ‘What is this for???’ and he replied ‘This is for taking input from the user. For example if you want the user’s name then you could do prompt(‘What is your name’)’. I thought that prompt is so useful, if we did not have prompt then we could not take input from the user. Our last command in the video was console.log(‘Hello World’) and it printed Hello World in the console. I was thinking why do we use this? And then I asked my father ‘Pops, what does console.log() do?’ and he replied ‘console.log() is mostly used for testing. When you will make a proper program then you will come to know where can we use console.log()’. I said ‘ok’.
This was my first introduction to the world of coding and computers and the journey had just started and continues in Part-II.
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