Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

I also used it for pranks.

This was all in my 30s.

Having caught the bug I now wish I'd discovered this stuff earlier. But due to being extremely poor growing up, undiagnosed dyslexia and another learning disability, and a mistrust of all technology, it was not to be.

I still love Autohotkey but mostly have moved on to "real" programming languages. Nothing better than getting the computer to do your job for you. So most of my programming is automation.

When I was 12 convinced my dad to get me Commodore 64 instead of a graduation trip (graduation trips are customary in Argentina when you finish primary and secondary school). We bought a used one for U$S 200.

This was 1989 and the social and economic landscape in Argentina was a mess. That year the inflation rate was over 3000% (it is not a typo) and those 200 dollars were a lot of money.

After we got it, my parents were concerned that I might get too obsessed with the computer, so they placed some additional constraints on when I could use it (the fact that we had only one TV might have also been a factor in his decision). I was allowed to use it only on Saturday mornings before noon.

Note that I just got the computer, I didn't have any storage medium.

One great thing about the Commodore 64 was that it came with BASIC, but most importantly, it came with a manual! The Commodore’s Basic manual was my first programming book.

What happened was that I was forced to work as if I had punched cards. I would spend most of my spare time during the week writing programs in a notebook I had. Thinking about ways to solve problems and reading and re-reading the C64 manual.

On Saturday mornings I would wake up at 6 am and hook-up the computer to the TV and start typing whatever program I was working on that week. Run it and debug it, improve it and around noon my mom would start reminding me that time was up. So at that point I began listing the BASIC source code and copying it back to my notebook.

Over the next few years I learned a lot, I re-discovered bubble-sort on my own (I learned the name much later), built hardware gizmos connected to the user port and I even made a very simple multi-tasking interpreter (I eventually got a datasette).

After high-school I studied Software Engineering (not exactly, but the name in Spanish doesn't translate well) and then I really learned to program (heck, I'm still learning).