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

I was first introduced to computers at age 9 (I'm not that old, the internet had been around for a little bit) when my "girlfriend" got me to talk to her on a chat site over summer break.

I started getting more and more interested in the things I saw like the way the chat programs worked (they were java applets), exploring them as a user and mod and learning how to "hack" them. It wasn't long before this lead me to communities where I was also shown HTML and I started learning about it.

When I was 10-11, I got into modding boards like the InvisionFree ones, which taught me a lot more about HTML and exposed me to JavaScript as you only had limited access to them so that's how all the modding was done, and a lot of those communities intersected with ones about making your own forum systems and/or modifying forums you had more access to (like hosting your own phpBB or IPB forums) which got me interested in PHP and MySQL.

By that point I'd heard a lot about C, etc. too and I was a lot more curious about computers than I was my schoolwork so I'd spend as much time learning about everything I could as possible. I started migrating to more general programming and hacking oriented communities when I was 12 and would stay up literally all night most nights and make up the sleep on the weekends, and I haven't had a proper sleeping schedule since.

I think that the TI-83 is basically the perfect programming environment for novice programmers. All of the functions and language constructs are tokens accessible only through menus. They're all listed in menus, and it's very easy to wonder what the "For" statement does, for example, after you scroll past it for the hundredth time.

If you give a 12-year-old a Python repl, then they'll be paralyzed. There's just too much freedom. In years of tinkering as a child (in between booting and launching WIN) the only things I ever figured out how to do in DOS were press the enter key to make lots of C:\ prompts appear, and type things to get a "Bad command or filename" error. Compare that to the TI-83, where I was able to figure stuff out with minimal introduction.

Another aspect that shouldn't be discounted is that students can practice programming during math classes...

My parents got me a Timex Sinclair 1000 when I was 10 or so, and I started programming out of the need for having something I could do with it. It became a Commodore 64 a couple of years later and that changed pretty much the rest of my life.

There was a Dutch magazine called "Zo zit dat" or (roughly translated) "That's how". It always had a computer section of two pages which I was interested in every time, and some day it featured how to build your website (save as htm, type Not much later I started experimenting with Javascript, which did not go too well because I didn't know of the existance of error messages (using IE6), had no experience of course, and there was nobody to guide me. I also hadn't discovered forums yet, and none of the classmates I had on MSN were into coding yet. But I learned it eventually :)

Yes, I think that at some point in the future (one we are hopefully quickly approaching) basic programming knowledge would be treated like arithmetic & literacy and be taught to every school kid.

But we aren't there yet, and there are plenty of kids (especially in poor countries) which simply don't have access to a computer and/or someone to give them that first nudge to start programming.