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Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?

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Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?

#31

Post by winrid »

It started with fixing them. Family didn't have a lot of money so I'd get old Pentium 3 machines for free (around time core2duo was popular) while in middle school.

I'd put Linux or Unix on them and play free games like Wolf:ET.

Linux because - was shopping for Windows on Ebay and found Ubuntu 6.04 cds.

Had to learn basic bash. Coding started from there.

Internet wasn't the best, so I setup my own squid proxy, then web servers, etc. By HS I was writing code for fun and profit.

All thanks to some old Pentiums. :)

Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?

#33

Post by filereaper »

Hacking rules.ini for C&C: Red-Alert!

Game was too frustrating, but hey changing this easy to understand rules.ini file completely changes it to my favour! Also you could do hilarious things like an attack dog launching an artillery as its primary weapon. It taught me how to debug and roll-changes back when the game crashed with the dreaded "Internal game error" message.

cue Neo from the Matrix who starts to see the world as just code

But seriously, it was my first introduction to "programming" and then got me into QBasic via "Complete Idiots Guide to Programming" which I borrowed from the local library. I was also super into Aerospace and this book [1] also from the local library gave me background into computer hardware.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Space-Journeys-James-Tomayk...

Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?

#36

Post by bribri »

filereaper wrote: post #33

Hacking rules.ini for C&C: Red-Alert! Game was too frustrating, but hey changing this easy to understand rules.ini file completely changes it to my favour! Also you could do hilarious things like an attack dog launching an artillery as its primary weapon. It taught me how to debug and roll-changes back when the game crashed with the dreaded "Internal game error" message. cue Neo from the Matrix who starts to see the…

It's so funny you say this because this was my introduction to modding and programming as well, except with Red Alert 2. I remember changing the cost of the items, adding new units, replacing the graphics, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?

#37

Post by bribri »

livueta wrote: post #10

Are there are any games they play/might be interested in that have scripting facilities of some sort? I got into tech of various flavors by learning to write RuneScape bots circa 2005-2009. There were a few publicly available Java reflection-based bot dev kits at the time, which was my initial entry point. I later got into more advanced programming topics by figuring out how the SDKs themselves worked and rolling my…

The very first program I wrote that did something useful was a naive runescape autominer using SCAR and pascal.

Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?

#38

Post by tluyben2 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #7

I wanted to create things; games, demos; even boring business applications ‘out of nothing’. That was when I was 80 around 35 years ago. I still do and still have the same feeling when I finish something.

8 not 80 but guess that was clear.

Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?

#39

Post by agildehaus »

BASIC games printed in 321 Contact magazines that you had to painstakingly enter yourself to play. At about 8 years old.

Ex: http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/zines/others/basictr3.gi...

Inevitably you'd copy something wrong, the game wouldn't compile or wouldn't work correctly, and debugging began.

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