I'm fairly sure my start to programming was from a demo disc that came with our PS2 which had a basic interpreter on it. I remember it could so some graphics stuff that was interesting, but I just made some simple text based programs.
Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
#42First, my TI-83 graphing calculator. I learned that I could write simple programs to take user input and do things like calculate the Pythagorean theorem. I eventually started writing text-based adventure games, and then simple graphical games by drawing pixels on the screen frame by frame.
Second, making a website using Flash. I had a great time drawing objects on a canvas, animating them using the timeline, and adding click-events to buttons. I ended up drawing a room where you could click on the computer to jump to a list of my favorite games, click on the journal to see something I wrote, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
#43Are 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…
Wow, this throws me back. I had the same exact experience. Now I'm back down memory lane thinking of that forum drama... The RuneScape botting scene was so strange. It was a really interesting subculture to be a part of. If you were ever active on JH, we probably have seen each other's posts...
An different but related scene was the RSPS (Runescape private server) community that created replications of the game with a reverse-engineered client. Developing private server code was my first experience with programming and with backend software problem spaces like networking, concurrency/event handling, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
#44Hacking 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.
Ha! I had fun with Red Alert 2 as well, though RA2's rules.ini seemed much more involved.
The RA2's rules.ini pretty much exposed the games internal hierarchical layout for units, i.e an IFV loaded with GI's is different compared to a IFV loaded with Engineers.
But serializing all of these led to a much larger file than RA1, it was quite a bit more difficult to hand-hack RA2's rules.ini. I ended up caving to a utility tool like TibEd and Red-Alchemist. [1]
Good times...
Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
#45The C64's BASIC prompt. The concept of a computer booting into an environment - an empty canvas, if you will - that allows you to immediately create something was ingenious.
Similarly, what sparked my interest in web programming was the ability to view the page source code in order to see how a specific result can be achieved.
While perhaps not going as far as the web's original creators envisioned it to be (the user being able to directly edit and publish from the browser itself) this feature allowed you to quickly learn from and build on existing code as well as try out new patterns and practices.
Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
#46NIBBLES.BAS and GORILLAS.BAS :)
Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
#47If they are ages 4-6 I would suggest the Code and Go robot mouse. I started my daughter out at 4 on this and she had a blast.
We have moved on visual programming.
I have been building a course on how to teach kids Scratch programming with her.
Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
#48Doing my bot scripts for Tibia (a freaking difficult MMORPG) when I was 13. The scripts were similar to JS.
Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
#49APIs. I documented my journey with them over here when I encountered them the first time art university https://www.robinwieruch.de/what-is-an-api-javascript They just empower you to build things.
Re: Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?
#50I had always been into technology and computers and had a few friends who were programmers, my mentor was a programmer, my dad was a programmer as well.
In high school I didn't always get along with the old man so I hadn't wanted to be a programmer honestly. But one time I had to do some VB with MS Excel for class and found it to be a lot of fun! I knew that it was kind of 'fake' boring programming compared to the stuff programmers do on the day to day, so I decided to learn real programming and now here I am almost 10 years later.
I think that you'll need to find a way to incorporate programming into some other domain that they fancy rather than trying to just introduce them to programming for the sake of it.