How to program a computer if you are a child/The master of the machine

The machine, the computer, is your faithful and devoted servant. It will always do what you tell it to do. It will never contest, unless you ask. It obeys the finger and the eye. You are the master, the creator, the author, the developer. We call ourselves like this among programmers, because we all together develop applications that make computers useful and enjoyable.

You do what you want with the machine. All you have to know is how to give it orders, to tell it what it ought to do, and it always obeys.

Programming means giving orders to the machine.

Never believe that you must obey the machine. It's the contrary.

The machine will not always understand what you tell it to do. It's up to you to learn how to make yourself understood.

To learn how to be the master of the machine, it is best to copy the others. Imitate them. Learn to do like them. From there you can do whatever you want.

For the developers, it is very easy to imitate the others: you copy their program, the text they write to control the machine, you paste it in your own pages, and you modify it, to have fun, or to do serious work.

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