Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?

I'm always impressed when I read that some people here started coding at a really young age.

Makes me wonder what motivated them to continue as well.

I personally learned at 16, so not super young. I guess what motivated me is that I knew nothing about my computer and wanted to better understand how it worked.

I learned to "code" at 9. The reason was we had an apple ][e with only a couple games and some BASIC programming manuals. If you wanted to do much interesting with it, the only option was to code something up. My (younger) brother and I used to write password protected "secret files" programs, and try to obfuscate the code listing so you couldn't find the password. Really simple stuff. One day I remember my dad (who is a tradesman that knows nothing about computers) helped me write code to plot a circle by solving the pythagorean formula for y=sqrt(h^2 - x^2) - neither of us knew sin/cos but he'd heard of pythagoras. (We were disappointed about the uneven spacing of points, I remember how game changing it was to learn trig years later)

This was in the late 80s. I think there was more incentive to learn to code back then because it was the only way to do anything fun. Now it's a much tougher sell

I think I was around 10 years old when I noticed an old x86 (not a 286 -- my god I remember the excitement when that beast first came out) was lying around.

I somehow just liked it. It had MS-DOS. So I learned that. I'm not sure if it had Basic. But it had a manual, and the manual talked about x86 assembly language, and gave examples of how to write programs using the debug command from the command line.

I was hooked. For a while. It was so interesting. I learned about interrupts and how to get the computer to do things. At that age, all I wanted to do was draw pretty colors and lines on the screen -- most of the examples (if I recall correctly) were for "business" apps, like accounting, or database entry.

So I have the hardcore story that I started with assembly at age 10! Haha. But when a 286 arrived, with QBasic on it, I got a book, "Idiots Guide To QBasic" -- that had the same color scheme aesthetic as a Yellowpages, and learned how to draw pretty colors and lines. It was pretty fun. I remember the first modems too, the sound they made, and when 56K was a big thing. I think there was a 14.4K at some point too :)

What motivated me to contine? I don't know--it was just interesting. I just found it fun. Making stuff. Come alive. On the screen. It was pretty fucking cool

Grew up in the 80s just as home and office desktop computers were becoming available. I really only wanted to make video games like the ones in the arcades. I bugged my parents until I got an 8-bit Atari 400, and I self-taught BASIC, machine/assembly and all the hardware/ROM capabilities. The most I learned was probably by disassembling retail games. I once tried to make a multitasking system by context switching in interrupt routines but I didn't really understand all the details to make it work for more than a brief moment. From there, learning dBase II and III got me summer jobs and doing C later on co-op programme terms fit right in.

I self-taught at 7 on a TRS-80 that I could use in the summertime, typing in the examples and then modifying them to make (pretty terrible) variants or games.

Got my first computer (Atari 1200XL) a little after a friend got an Apple ][. We learned by typing in games from books and magazines and modifying them.

I sold my first program around age 11 for $20. It was 6502 assembly subroutine to calculate an XMODEM checksum for a BBS. They had BASIC code that worked okay for a 300 baud modem, but took too long to calculate the checksum for 1200 baud modems. That was hand assembled from op codes in a book and represented almost $1/byte of object code. (Imagine if we got paid that much now. :) )

I (mistakenly) thought I was pretty good until I showed up at college and couldn’t breeze through an intro level actual programming class, so “starting at 7” didn’t really mean that much in terms of my professional career.