This would be an interesting supplement to the poll conducted two days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2042320)
Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
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Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#2I've often wondered to what extent programming is like learning a musical instrument or another language. That is, you can learn these things when you're older, but in order to truly master them you must start when you're young.
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#3In the 6th grade. I had Giardiasis ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giardiasis ) and ended up spending a couple of weeks at home with nothing to do. I taught myself BASIC on the Vtech Precomputer 1000 (http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/324)
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#4Depends what you consider programming, I started doing HTML at 12 but didn't start real programming till 15.
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#5I think the App Store is helping here by introducing people to a huge variety of applications, thus giving them a huge base from which to come up with app ideas later if they become programmers.
So even if someone starts programming at a later age, experience learned with novel apps at a younger age can be helpful.
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#6Apple II Basic at 5.
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#7I got my first wire when I was 12 years old for the backup application/ms-dos. It was an endless amount of money. :)
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#8Mine was very gradual to the point where I´m not sure how to answer it. I remember from an early age playing with software like Trillian Pro and Frontpage (express maybe too?) and seeing what everything did and watching the HTML change. I didn´t have Internet access very often (I was restricted on when I could dial in on my old Windows 95 and later 98 boxes), so I never hosted anything. But when I was online I started finding JavaScript snippets and starting playing with them and started figuring out what they did to the point where I was starting to do programming that way by the time I was nine or ten.
The first time I specifically felt like I was programming was when friend when I was nine showed me an old QBasic book he had found. He showed me some little programs he had written and that night I spent all night on our old Windows 3.1 computer seeing what I could do with it. I just made little text adventure games and math equation solvers.
Then once I we got DSL around when I was 11 I started to hang on USENET and IRC (older technologies of the time, but they were cool to me) where some folks introduced me to Python.
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#9Looks like we're all part of the "rich kids" club.
http://geekfeminism.org/2010/07/27/if-you-were-hacking-since...
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#10Visual Basic, text-based Russian roulette at age 9...