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Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

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

#81

Post by mikewarot »

The math department at my High School had gotten some Commodore PET computers with floppy drives! To be used in classes starting the year after I graduated. Some of us were given access to them during lunch during my Senior year.

So my first programming was in BASIC.

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

#82

Post by yodsanklai »

We got a commodore C64 for Christmas when I was about 8. There was a built-in basic interpreter and many books and magazines taught you about that. I don't know if you can call that coding, but I learned how to write simple programs. Then I upgraded to an Amiga, and learned some assembly and some 3D and various graphics effects, mostly from magazines and friends. I eventually got a proper CS education in college and then kept learning ever since.

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

#83

Post by hackermailman »

Had to modify some program so just read the code and guessed mimicking what I read. It mostly just worked so continued doing that and reading enough docs I could write my own. Did that hacking for years until I finally read a real book on programming languages I think it was SICP but could have been something else before that like a SML compiler book

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

#86

Post by bawis »

another_twist wrote: post #24

Started by reading lots of articles on Topcoder (they have a dynamic programming tutorial which imo is the best material on DP). Then did exercises from CLRS before writing a single line of code. I considered it leg work and not of very high value (remains true though, the best paying jobs in tech are research and in finance its quant trading). Then I dived head first into C++ and Java, slogged through the pain and I…

Are you referring to this tutorial?

https://www.topcoder.com/thrive/articles/Dynamic%20Programmi...

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

#87

Post by Breza »

pentaphobe wrote: post #60

Was offline and had no tech people or resources around, but got access to an unused 286 which booted into a mysterious "C:\" prompt Slowly worked out how navigate the system, then tried running the various built in things I found One of these was QBASIC. Started reading through and messing with the example games which were part of the built-in QBASIC in MS-DOS Reverse engineering how they worked gave a lot of the cor…

Happy to see a shoutout to QBASIC in this thread. That was my first programming language, taught in 10th grade intro to programming. I loved it! I then took C++ at the local community college then AP Comp Sci in 12th grade.

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

#88

Post by conductr »

Tutorial sites circa late 90s, before blog was a term. I bought a book about HTML but quickly found it was easier to search and W3schools came online around this time. Google was new and a godsend. Had a few failed attempts with Perl and C. Then stumbled on PHP 3 and the LAMP stack and was off to the races.

Started and ran a web hosting business by 2002. All from googling solutions as they arose, I knew nothing about sysadmin. Quickly got out of it by selling it in 2003.

I continued on with PHP, then rails, python, JavaScript , etc trying to build a billion dollar idea without leaving my apartment without talking to people. I didn’t but I learned a lot. My motivation was always money, I was an entrepreneurial kid way before it was cool.

I view it as a hobby now. I feel like I know enough and can build anything I imagine (video games as exceptions). I like to build things like an inventor would. I never really learned to do the marketing and sales part right. I can do this pretty well IRL but driving traffic has never been fun for me.

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

#89

Post by minder-4001 »

Tracking Russian satellites at school, one of the younger teachers had an account on the local university computer. He did data reduction and orbit calculations in Fortran and showed me the code, letting me try simple stuff. I found the spherical trig nasty, but the Fortan easy to understand.

Shortly after at Uni I wrote a dating system for the Rag Committee (UK thing to raise money for local charities) whilst learning other languages. Had fun with it and annoyed a few people.

Got a job with ICL and they taught me more languages and let me write some useful software as well as some outside-work fun stuff.

These days I use Python, bash and SQL, with occasional Perl. Some of the languages I used to know have completely disappeared like S3, Snowball, Pop3, 1900 assembler and so on.

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