I used to write in Pascal when I was at university...

I liked programming in Pascal very much especially when I took a computer course which was compulsory for all First Year Engineering students at UiTM, Shah Alam. That was 20 years back.

As an engineering student, I planned to go to Germany to further my studies there after graduation at UiTM. I wanted to become a professional engineer, not a computer programmer, but I ended up teaching ICT and Computer Studies at a holistic Islamic educational institution in the Klang Valley. :)

When I came across an article on picture-driven computing on the BBC website, I thought to myself: Things are really getting less tough nowadays and this seems contrary to one's self-motivation with the motto, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." :)

Anyway, in order to keep abreast of the times and latest technologies, if you're into cool programming, go for it!

An excerpt of the article is as follows:

Picture-Driven Computing
New research could enable computer programming based on screen shots, not just code

Until the 1980s, using a computer program meant memorizing a lot of commands and typing them in a line at a time, only to get lines of text back. The graphical user interface, or GUI, changed that. By representing programs, program functions, and data as two-dimensional images — like icons, buttons and windows — the GUI made intuitive and spatial what had been memory intensive and laborious.

But while the GUI made things easier for computer users, it didn’t make them any easier for computer programmers. Underlying GUI components is a lot of computer code, and usually, building or customizing a program, or getting different programs to work together, still means manipulating that code. Researchers in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab hope to change that, with a system that allows people to write programs using screen shots of GUIs. Ultimately, the system could allow casual computer users to create their own programs without having to master a programming language.