![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_2\/1733_VB6.jpg\")
\nSorting through all those boxes of books we brought up yesterday.<\/p>\n
\nSorting through all those boxes of books we brought up yesterday.<\/p>\n
Quite a lot of them we will shelve because we expect to read or browse them some time in the future.<\/p>\n
Many more books we will give away, because realistically – given how many books there are in the world – we do not think we will read them again. They may be good, I may have enjoyed and valued them at one point, but if I wanted to read something, I wouldn’t choose to read any of these again.<\/p>\n
A very few books we will put back in a box in the basement, such as one phone catalogue, just to show that these things used to exist. <\/p>\n
And some books are actually so outdated and useless that there is no point trying to give them away. Old programming books, for example. Those will go straight into recycling.<\/p>\n
The book in the photo, about Visual Basic 6.0, was one of my first programming books. It was a big purchase at the time, and I remember working through it. I came to programming from the scripting world, from Excel macros and VBA scripts. I remember struggling with the concept of “objects” in object-oriented programming and trying to understand what the meaning and the point of them was. I remember a friend (an online friend) describing a “stopwatch” object for me, and a lightbulb moment when I got his point.<\/p>\n
I considered keeping this book, out of pure nostalgia. But what would I ever do with it? Who would open it, who would want to look inside?<\/p>\n
When I was a child, I spent hours reading old science magazines, and old books about explorers and natural wonders and so on. Today’s children don’t do that, and never will. There is so much else to entertain them and keep them busy. And myself as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sorting through all those boxes of books we brought up yesterday. Quite a lot of them we will shelve because we expect to read or browse them some time in the future. Many more books we will give away, because realistically – given how many books there are in the world – we do not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,9,4,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-geeky_things","category-observing_the_self","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11888"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11891,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11888\/revisions\/11891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}