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Poll: How old were you when you started programming?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?

#61

Post by Tycho »

I tinkered with ZX Spectrum macros from books/magazines occassionally when I was a kid... shame nobody was around to encourage me ever so slightly (once I got a games console, I stopped completely). I also meddled with websites a tiny bit, and had some programming lessons at school.

But I didn't get into programming seriously until I was 22 (VBA scripting for Excel at work). Sometimes I wonder how hard it will be to catch up, although so long as I stay ahead of the average CS graduate I should be OK. I think.

Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?

#62

Post by alcoholiday »

Started programming "Paper Computers" around 8, first got my hands on a "portable teletype" connected to a (who knows what) operated by Tymshare.

My language path looked something like: Paper Assembler (hand assembled, hand executed), Basic. APL (on an IBM-5100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100) National Semiconductor SC/MP Machine Code (hand assembled, and entered on hex keypad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Semiconductor_SC/MP), C, C++ (dark days indeed), Scheme (ahh... that's better!), Javascript (hey... not unlike Scheme), Powerpoint (became an "executive"), Perl, Python, Groovy (surprisingly awesome, been meaning to write a "Groovy is an acceptable Lisp" post)

Never done anything meaningful in Java (all the ugly of C++!), Ruby (just haven't had a reason) nor Haskell (but think it's kind of pretty)

Scheme is still my favorite by far since I find it the most beautiful and powerful.

Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?

#64

Post by docgnome »

My brother in law (to be) started teaching me C++ on a road trip. When we got back I snagged a old Apple IIe from the high school that they were just tossing. After a few months of Apple Basic and a giant program where I didn't leave enough room between lines to fix a bug... I went back to C++

Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?

#65

Post by alanl »

callmeed wrote: post #53

Born in '75 ... my parents bought me an Atari 400 and I programmed BASIC on it ... but I can't remember what year. The 400 came out in 79 but I think it was a couple years after that.

Yeah, BASIC on the Atari 400 was my first experience too.

It was the early 80's and I was about 7/8 yrs old, the guy in my local electronics shop used to allow my brother and I to photocopy programs from various magazines, of course they would be lost when we turned off the atari, also sometimes we messed up the photocoying, so we were forced to try figure it out our selves. What fun!

Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?

#67

Post by JonnieCache »

mikeryan wrote: post #46

Commodore 64 bought with a paper route money. Sub poll, who's first program looked like this? 10 print "Mike Rocks" 20 goto 10

Yep. Did this on the BBC Master in school. The teacher wan't happy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Master

It would have looked something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj2NOTanzWI

Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?

#68

Post by joezydeco »

zephjc wrote: post #55
mikeryan wrote: post #46

Commodore 64 bought with a paper route money. Sub poll, who's first program looked like this? 10 print "Mike Rocks" 20 goto 10

Funny, my first was similar, in Apple ][ BASIC. When I was in 7th grade, a friend (still to this day) and I had a typing class which used Apple ][s. One day we had a substitute teacher in who knew absolutely nothing about computers. I decided it would be funny to prank her so I wrote something like: 10 PRINT "GOVERNMENT ACCESS ONLY: THE FBI HAS BEEN CONTACTED" 20 FLASH 30 GOTO 10 I called her over with a worried face…

The advanced Apple ][ trick was to make the line 13 characters long and add the concatenation ; at the end:

  10 PRINT "I AM COOL!   ";
  20 GOTO 10
On a 40-character text display, amazing things happen...

Re: Poll: How old were you when you started programming?

#69

Post by eekfuh »

14 on a TI 83 while bored at school. Then I crashed my dad's car into a fence at 14 and he made me learn java as my punishment (I was trying to wash his civic, so he wasn't harsh on me). I hated java so bad that other than some TI basic apps, I didn't program again until 17 when I got heavy into PHP and then landed a job doing that.
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