Benji Flaming

My involvement with programming also started somewhere around age eight, when my family purchased an Apple IIgs. Entranced by a tutorial on Applesoft BASIC, I began studying it in depth. When it became apparent that I’d need to use PEEK, POKE, and CALL, to accomplish most of the things I wanted to do, I began looking for information on writing programs for the Apple IIgs in assembly language. Unfortunately, while I found a book with a good introduction to assembly for the 6502 (the processor used in the Apple II series), I was not able to get my hands on an assembler. I was, sadly, destined to spend several additional years playing with other BASIC variants.

I moved into the ‘PC’ world (which was then called the ‘IBM-compatible’ world) with a 16MHz 386 machine, an 80MB hard drive, 4MB of RAM, DOS 5.0, and Windows 3.1. I gladly embraced QuickBASIC’s lack of line numbers, and did a bit of dabbling with it. Eventually, I ‘inherited’ a no-longer-needed copy of Visual Basic 3.0, which I found much more useful than the other BASIC family members I’d worked with. Around this time, I also inherited Borland’s Turbo C and Turbo C++ (both of which came on a series of 5 1/4′ floppy disks).

Somewhere along the line, I got a 2400-baud modem, and started calling local BBSes. I remember spending a lot of time playing TEOS, in particular. When LORD2 came out, I registered a copy, and began immersing myself in the intricacies of the game’s ‘RTScript’ scripting language. I even started developing a custom game, based on the LORD2 engine, with the addition of more complex RPG aspects.

Then, along came the Internet….

With access to such a wealth of information and technology, I gradually (over the course of many years) became interested in GNU/Linux, and the hacker ethic. The ability to make actual modifications to the source code of the programs I used was a powerful incentive to increase my knowledge of C and C++. (I’d previously purchased a copy of Visual C++ 6.0, but hadn’t written anything more substantial than a few experimental VST plug-ins.)

Since then, I’ve also spent a fair amount of time working with PHP. I spent several months of intense development on a content management system designed to take advantage of the new object-oriented features of PHP 5. I also spent some time familiarizing myself with Python – largely because of the powerful cross-platform SCons build system. (I’ve also studied, but never used, Java, Perl, and OCaml.)

My primary programming project right now is Tinara – an effort to implement an extensible, cross-platform framework for the distributed production and rendering of temporal media. I’ve actually moved over to Ruby as the primary language for this project (with certain performance-sensitive portions written in a compiled language).