Ask HN: How did you learn to code? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#61

Post by euroderf » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 11:03 AM UTC

Early 70s. Gotta think.

My nearest public library had a manual on some flavor of BASIC, so I took that out and flipped thru it and wondered how anyone could think it was difficult. Then I had an opportunity to earn a few bucks writing a VIC-20 BASIC program to plot a transformer hysteresis curve.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#62

Post by andreldm » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 11:05 AM UTC

Game Maker 4.2 and then C with Allegro, lots of unfinished games and prototypes, but it was fun.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#63

Post by Slimbo » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 11:19 AM UTC

A Dragon 32 from the BASIC manual that shipped with it. This was in 1982. My parents had bought me the machine, which was fortunately blessed with a great keyboard, but it had almost no games for it, and no shops stocked them. So I made my own using the book.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#64

Post by opengrass » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 11:25 AM UTC

Designed websites and wanted to get into account portal trickery. So I copy and pasted a sample with Firebase Auth, and now I'm learning to adapt my own backend stuff for more features.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#65

Post by jacknews » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 11:49 AM UTC

Sinclair zx80 then an Acorn Atom when I was a kid. You couldn't do much with them if you couldn't program, so...

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#66

Post by boslo-km » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 1:44 PM UTC

Pre-widespread-home-internet (80s/90s), it was mostly obsessive experimentation while trying to get your hands on books, manuals, magazines, etc. If you were lucky, BBSes and (eventually) walled gardens like Compuserve offered some access to programmer communities.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#67

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#68

Post by outofmyshed » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

Typing in code from magazines into my ZX Spectrum. Learning a bit of Z80 assembly from a library book. Being taught Pascal at college. Learning Perl to create grammars. Writing Delphi apps to automate stuff on Windows. Teaching myself C from K&R to extend Apache.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#69

Post by thrance » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

Bored in math or physics class back in Highschool, programming little games in BASIC on my TI-82, learning everything by just navigating the menus and trying to guess what each keywords meant.

Then, finding programming fun, decided to follow a Java tutorial (I knew the language from Minecraft), and code little projects in it. I made a few simple arcade games for my phone (whose source code I have lost, since I didn't know about git back then...).

Later in engineering school, learned Pascal, Fortran and C. At the same time, became interested in Python and Rust.

Nowadays, I'm a full-time dev, working mostly in Rust and sometimes Typescript.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#70

Post by QuiEgo » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

My TFC clan needed a webpage to schedule practices. I decided to make one. It ended up being more complicated than 13 year old me expected, but I was hooked after that.