I was five or six years old when I first felt the joy of computer programming. That was in the early 1980s, when not many people had computers. One day my dad brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of the first affordable mass-market computers in the world. That device looked like a clunky keyboard that used a TV as a monitor. The software (mostly the games) came on cartridges, but the games took a long time to load, and while I waited I usually flipped through the incredible programming manual that came with the Spectrum. The manual is filled with simple programs written in the BASIC programming language. I…