School's intro to computers, when I was 12, was the formal beginning. But I think the real start was before then; learning how to give people an order/direction they can't possibly fuck up.

if there are human beings involved, there is always a way to fubar the situation, my dear @NoMad.

@rootofskynet that is true. That's how I learned about estimation and risk management 😛 and also why I like computers and robots more than humans; They have less error of judgement.

@NoMad fascinating. let's go down that rabbit hole, shall we?

you are implying, that computers can judge the right way. that might be true, but considering the circumstances, that every judgment algorithm is developed by human beings (as far as we know), they can produce some legendary fails, ain't that right?
therefore, computers, however how fancy and technologicaly improved they are, can make stupid errors, that need to be debugged.

@rootofskynet nope. Given the right input, a program never makes error of judgement. it only fails successfully. A robot doesn't "forget" to turn off the stove. A human does.

A program may not work as a human intends, but it certainly does what a human told it to do within its frame of execution. There are no surprises in computing, only lack of knowledge. (Unless you're bad at dev, in which case it's magic to you)

@NoMad well.. indeed.
true, given the right input, any program can produce the right output. we don't make mistakes, just have happy little accidents.

my best guess is, that there is always a lack of knowledge. one just can't know everything imho.

One extremely positive aspect of self-written software running on a computer is, that you actually can fix the errors.
Nobody knows how to fix the software running in human brains.