Poll: When did you start programming? • Hacker News Board

Your poll is broken. I read my first programming book (a programmed instruction text on machine programming) in the mid-60s. This was neither before the 60s nor in the 70s.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming?

#57

Post by J3L2404 » Mon, Dec 27, 2010, 4:08 PM UTC

Prime number sieve on an HP-11C. Gotos and labels baby!

Re: Poll: When did you start programming?

#58

Post by Qz » Mon, Dec 27, 2010, 4:21 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #50

Qz wrote: post #10

In BASIC (the horror) when I was maybe 6 or 7. I tried making text adventure games by writing out every if/then branch explicitly...

Same here, BASIC, 5 or 6. Text adventure games, lemonade stand, and so on. Dijkstra says, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." But he complained about nearly everything.

I never really got very far with BASIC anyway, and started reading about OOP when I was maybe 12? Hopefully I was inoculated in time...

Re: Poll: When did you start programming?

#59

Post by gnosis » Mon, Dec 27, 2010, 4:44 PM UTC

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709074

Re: Poll: When did you start programming?

#60

Post by gherlein » Mon, Dec 27, 2010, 5:19 PM UTC

I wrote my first code on a TRS-80 model 1 with level one basic and a cassette drive. Our high school math teacher got us permission to use the local University mainframe to learn fortran. That was in 9th grade in 1978. I was 14.