TI Basic on my TI-83+ in high school math class at around age 15 or so. Didn't get to real programming until college.
Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
11–20 of 121 posts
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#12I discovered programming on the TI-83, bored in English Lit class.
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#13I began programming when I've got my first computer, an Atari 600XL (what a pos for 1992). I learnt BASIC from a collection of science magazines from the 80s that my older brothers had and from an Atari BASIC manual.
Unfortunately I never had a diskette drive nor some assembler books :(
Edit: I was 8.
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#14I'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.
Seems like a pretty apt analogy, programming is a very creative process. When you're a kid you might start off with very simple instruments, toys even. That's akin to me first programming Pirch and mIRC without really thinking about the fact I was programming, I just wanted to make an fserve or whatever. Then I actually started reading about it and learned VB. I don't use those languages anymore just as older and more experienced musicians wouldn't use cheap toy instruments, artists would stop using crayons, etc. But I learned a lot by "playing" in my early teen years.
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#15I was 11 or 12. I learned the really hard way. I was in Norway for a month and I only had an old 486 at my disposal, a hex editor and some Sega Megadrive games and an emulator (the Megadrive uses a Motorola 68000 processor)
I was curious how the games worked so I started hex editing them at random, seeing what would happen if I changed this and that, etc.
Long story short I learned to write programs in 68000 machine code (binary) and recognize patterns in ROMs (music, art, code). I still remember how to code simple things in machine code.
Imagine my joy when I discovered assemblers, and after that, compilers a while later :)
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#16I got my first real computer (a C128D - C64 + C128 in one) when I was 8, with a pile of games on floppy discs. A year later, I was bored of the games and I picked up one of the books that came with it, that was titled something along the lines of "Programming your C64 with BASIC"...
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#17I put 6-10 but it's not like I have 25 years of programming experience, or like it was an early calling.
It's for the hours spent mostly copying BASIC programs from magazines on an Amstrad CPC464. (with very little success rate: these magazine program were not quite working) Then, there's a gap of a few years, before college where I realized that maybe I should go with Computer Science, rather than Mechanical Engineering.
Now, I'm not quite a developer per se (in that I've never had a purely development job and that I'm mostly hacking things together rather than producing production code) but still spend most of my free time thinking about projects and building early proof-of-concepts and prototypes.
At this point, I'm very glad I know some programming but am still wondering if I should go full-on with it and work on it to the point where I can confidently look for a development job...
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#18I didn't own a computer so I'd check out Apple II Basic programming books from the school library and write the "programs" out on a piece of paper. I started doing this roughly in the 3rd grade... seems rather sad now...
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#19I feel so young. All of you started on Ataris or C64 in BASIC. I started when I was ten with Python 2.5 on Windows XP.
Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
#20My grandpa bought me a TRS-80 when I was 4-5 (don't recall exactly) because "computers are the future." My only cartridges were LOGO and Sokoban so if I wasn't in the mood to push boxes around...
I don't know if you can really call it programming but I'd spend hours writing out huge I/O conversations with the computer that only worked if you knew how it was supposed to go in advance. I found it fascinating.
"Hello, I'm a computer, what's your name?" "Hello [name], how are you feeling today?" "I'm glad you're feeling [feeling]!" etc
And I had the companion radio shack cassette deck that you could use to store programs on. I always had to copy those programs out of the book because I didn't understand them at all.