Poll: How long have you been programming?

Ha! Wow, this is pretty much exactly how I started. Playing with the numbers in Gorillas to make the Banana blast radius much larger.

The holy grail was to create a "homing banana", but my 10 year old brain couldn't work out the math.

Not a programmer. I read Hacker News just cuz it's interesting.

I started out in 2001. Back then I was working for some company as a graphics designer -- I had been there for about 1 year (fresh out of school) -- building the layouts for their countless websites. Back then the whole internet industry was about to collapse and I could see the proverbial axe dangling over me come the end of my year contract.

A coworker of mine was responsible for the programming. Mostly perl and php. I had never touched a line of code. Not even HTML. I was doing everything a-la WYSIWYG. The mere thought of having to write code made me cringe but it was obvious that I had to adapt if I wanted to keep receiving pay checks. So I set out to teach myself everything I could about programming in the boss' time.

I scoured the internet and read every bit I could find. I started out with BlitzBasic[1] and C# (It was in beta back then). To my complete astonishment, I actually /really/ loved every bit of it. Since then I quit my job and went home to become a halfway decent programmer. I was adamant that this would be my new career path. And I succeeded!

Around 2008/2009, C# was into its 3rd iteration if memory serves. I had left Blitzbasic behind a long time ago. I was still enjoying every minute I could spend typing code. However, C# had some traits that really started to rub me the wrong way. The 'everything is an object' OOP mentality, coupled with the pretentious and obtuse habit of corporations to not give a shit about skills unless you can recite all design patterns by heart, really made me lose faith in the whole programming thing.

Fortunately, that's when Go[2] came into view and it allowed me to fall in love with programming all over again. I've never looked back to C# since that day. In the meantime, I've also picked up C, Scheme, Forth, Factor and a host of other languages I love working with.

I am very much a D.S.L. kind of guy but Go is definitely my primary go-to guy for most stuff.

[1]: http://www.blitzbasic.com

[2]: http://golang.org

QB was one of the earlier languages I played around with, too, actually, and only ten years ago. I think it was an excellent environment for learning to program. It was simple, with many built-in functions for graphics and audio—everything a growing game programmer needs. It also had a pretty good editor, with documentation and examples only a right-click away. The now-defunct QB4All community was also very friendly and helpful.

Furthermore, I’d say that having an underpowered but batteries-included language helps focus you on the goal of making a thing, rather than the process. It also encourages hacking, to circumvent the language’s restrictions. Could you ask for better?

yet there are a lot of concepts they need to digest before they jump into the html/js world. it already means they need to learn two languages (html and js), interaction between them , etc... I'm not even mentioning things like - open notepad, save the file, make sure you get the extension right, fire up the browser, click open (why not in address bar? oh yeah, you can, but tell a kid the file:/// business and see if they remember it after 3-4 days of not doing it) and see what happens. of course it's just a reload away next time.

not as easy as qbasic.exe, then typing in some code in, then hitting 'run' and seeing what happens.

speaking from experience here, i have 8 and 10 yo, and tried this with both of them. my friend tried with his 9 yo. they seem to get the idea of assignments, loops etc, but it just doesn't excite them. can't generalise on a test sample of 3, so just my 2p.