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Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

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Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#21

Post by adoyle »

jejones3141 wrote: post #13

As a sophomore in high school (1971), I had the good fortune to take part in an NSF-sponsored seminar that taught BASIC and the elements of numerical analysis. Afterwards, not having computer access, I started up a notebook that I wrote BASIC programs in. I wish I still had it.

My math teacher in the 8th grade in 1971 made up a virtual machine with an assembly-like instruction set. He had us write programs and then 'execute' them by thinking about them as though we were the VM. Once we got the hang of that, we learned Fortran and got to send punched card jobs to a computer on the other side of town. Turnaround time was measured in days. It's been a wild ride since then.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#23

Post by ido »

_rs wrote: post #20
GreekOphion wrote: post #14

When you were 12 or younger how did you learn how to program? I was 16 when I started programming as a hobby and I had a programming class. I wish I started programming when I was 12.

I started in the mmorpg server-emu "scene". Stuff like World of Warcraft servers, etc. At that point I knew just basic HTML before jumping in. There were some people offering to make login, registration scripts, etc. for server websites. Along with a handful of people throwing around python in IRC rooms, IRC bots, etc. It was a pretty natural process, from looking at some of their scripts and wondering "wtf" all the…

    Every assignment or lesson was out of a book 
    that must have been 10 years old.
Why does a book for introduction to programming need to be newer than 10 years? SICP is almost 30 years old.

I assure you no revolutions in elementary BASIC programming have happened since 2002 :)

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#24

Post by tkahn6 »

lawn wrote: post #6

Impressive that so many started at 13 or before. I'm a bit jealous.

I started at 9 but I don't think you have much to be jealous about. I did it because it was fun and I probably had a bit of a head start in terms of debugging skills, but really I don't think the intellectual maturity of someone What I know about software architecture and programming concepts now at the age of 20 entirely dwarfs the accumulated knowledge and skills I gained from 9 til 13. I just did not have the intellectual maturity to really understand in a conscious way concepts like closures, types (sums vs products, unions vs records), data structures, algorithm performance (other than a visceral understanding of what is faster), static vs instance functions/variables, manual memory management. And so much more.

I think my knowledge and skillset grows exponentially year over year, but in the beginning I did not have much to compound and not enough maturity to gather and own much knowledge and experience. Would I be roughly where I'm at now if I had started at 14 or 15? I've thought about this a lot and I don't know.

Other thoughts on this are appreciated.

To be clear, I don't for a second regret the time I spent early on learning how to program; it was so much fun and intellectually stimulating. I'm actually quite proud of how early I started.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#25

Post by bryanlarsen »

GreekOphion wrote: post #14

When you were 12 or younger how did you learn how to program? I was 16 when I started programming as a hobby and I had a programming class. I wish I started programming when I was 12.

I started learning to program the day after we got our first computer. When we got it, there were only two things it could do:

- play games if you plugged the cartridge into the side. We had one cartridge "Popcorn", which occupied Christmas day.

- if you didn't plug a cartridge into the side it dropped you into a BASIC interpreter and sat there with a blinking cursor waiting for you to program it.

So on Boxing Day I started reading the BASIC manual and started learning to program. I still remember parts of that first program, a bingo number puller.

20 IF N=1 OR N=2 OR N=3 OR N=4 OR N=5 OR N=6 OR N=7 OR N=8 OR N=9 OR N=10 OR N=11 OR N=12 OR N=13 OR N=14 OR N=15 THEN PRINT "B"

now get off my lawn.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#26

Post by _rs »

ido wrote: post #23
_rs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started in the mmorpg server-emu "scene". Stuff like World of Warcraft servers, etc. At that point I knew just basic HTML before jumping in. There were some people offering to make login, registration scripts, etc. for server websites. Along with a handful of people throwing around python in IRC rooms, IRC bots, etc. It was a pretty natural process, from looking at some of their scripts and wondering "wtf" all the…

Every assignment or lesson was out of a book that must have been 10 years old. Why does a book for introduction to programming need to be newer than 10 years? SICP is almost 30 years old. I assure you no revolutions in elementary BASIC programming have happened since 2002 :)

I think, in general, a book that old is a turn off to many (high school) students, especially those who might not have wanted to take the class in the first place.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#27

Post by ido »

rabidsnail wrote: post #15

Almost every hacker I know started between the ages of 11 and 14. That seems to be the sweet spot; the time when brains are malleable enough to be able to adapt to strange new concepts but have enough knowledge to be able to put those concepts in some context. I think that compsci programs should be like art schools where your portfolio is what's considered first when you apply for admission.

I was born in 1983 and was fortunate enough that my parents got our first computer at 1987 (I always had a computer since then and probably started programming in my early teens).

However there are plenty of people who are far less fortunate and were not exposed to programming until much later in life (I know quite a few good programmers like that), is it fair to disallow them of a CS education at the because they don't have a portfolio at the age of 18?

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#28

Post by cfsharp »

I'm amazed by the amount of people starting before 12. I started at 13, I was looking at random YouTube videos, and ran across a video entitled something along the lines of "How to make a web browser in VB." I then began to look at more of these videos until I could make a calculator, web browser, and progress bar. Then I left programming for a year. :( After a year, i picked it back up with a tip from a friend to not use VB, but instead use C#. After that I started to build stuff on my own and wrote a game in C#. After that I picked up a book called C++ Primer Plus from a local book store (I was 15 by this time), and read through it in about a month. Now, 2 years later I am working on a start-up using mainly C++ with bits of several other languages with the friend that tipped me off to C#. Cheers to you friend.

It also interests me that so many people started with HTML. I never really "learned" HTML, nor was it the first language I used. I just had to use it once to build a website, and it came extremely naturally after a bit of Google searching for tags.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#30

Post by raganwald »

jejones3141 wrote: post #13

As a sophomore in high school (1971), I had the good fortune to take part in an NSF-sponsored seminar that taught BASIC and the elements of numerical analysis. Afterwards, not having computer access, I started up a notebook that I wrote BASIC programs in. I wish I still had it.

About the same year, although I was 9 at the time. I discovered that there was no requirement to have an account to submit a job to the High Speed Job Stream in UofT’s Sanford Fleming building. You just typed your program up on punch cards, prepended the deck with a special card that instructed the system whether to use WATFOR, SNOBOL, or LISP (I did not try PL/I), and put it in the hopper behind everyone else’s job. Moments later, the line printer a few feet away would spew your output at high speed.
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