The First Program I Wrote

This was the first program I ever wrote. Hard to believe it has already been 20 years. When I studied bridge design at university, we had to look up live load distribution factors in tables. One of the load models we used was H30, from the Russian standard. This took quite a lot of time. The results depended on the load type, beam length, section being checked, crossbeam stiffness, number of main girders, and other factors. If the exact value was missing from the table, we had to find the values on either side and interpolate. I had already set up almost the entire calculation process in Excel to reduce manual work. But the table lookups still took too much time. So I went to a bookstore and bought a book on Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6). I worked through it step by step, day and night. I learned how to build an interface, add buttons, text boxes, and dropdown lists, and make things happen when someone clicked a button. Then I digitized all the reference tables. The program could look up values, perform two-dimensional interpolation, and display diagrams to make the results easier to understand. It was a small tool, but it saved us a lot of time on our bridge design assignments. My classmates copied it and shared it with others. It became a useful tool for many students back then. Since then, I have taught myself several programming languages and developed many more programs. But These days, I have forgotten most of the syntax. I now use just one “programming language”: ChatGPT. 😄 My most frequently used command is: “That’s not what I meant. Let me explain again…”