Is programming your profession? When did you start programming? What is your favourite programming language?

I'm actually a Christian (Protestant) Minister by profession, but prior to training for the ministry, I completed a Bachelor of Commerce in Management of Information Systems and Management Science.

As a kid, I was a bit of a computer nerd, but over time, I increasingly got more interested in dealing with people and less interested in dealing with computers. After finishing my theological training about ten years ago, I've lived with one foot in the IT industry and one foot in the Christian ministry. The job I'm currently doing is the first one in which I'm doing both at once, though. I'm working for a theological college in Melbourne, coordinating on their Distance Education program. As part of that, I work on the Moodle E-learning software and also take care of the main Drupal based website.

I started programming in my early teens. Our family's first computer was a Dick Smith VZ-200 computer (they were sold in Australia and New Zealand), but it was when I get a Commodore 64 that I made my first real attempt at programming. I learned machine code, to the extent that I wrote a little pop-up menu system with most of the code residing in RAM that was normally hidden by the C-64's 16KB Basic ROM.

I'm not really sure that I do have a favourite programming language. The main two I use at the moment are C for the kernel work, and PHP for my website development work. I like them both, but it's a case of horses for courses: C is great for kernel programming and PHP is great for websites. To flip the question on its head, the language I like least is Scheme. I had to learn it while doing the Computer Science papers in my B.Com, and I think all those brackets do more for the sale of headache tablets than they do for readability! :)

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