What's up with all these polls? I don't understand the significance of this poll, besides being an icebreaker/conversation starter. HN seems to be stuck in naval gazing* mode. *navel gazing.
NavEl gazing. (Or Omphaloskepsis [1], if you are so inclined)
Naval gazing would be a pretty fun thing to actually.
I wish I had the experience some of these comments show. I'm 24 an didn't see a line of code until high school..... so 10 years if you count that. 3 years if you count anything worthwhile (wanting to actually learn what I was doing)
What's up with all these polls? I don't understand the significance of this poll, besides being an icebreaker/conversation starter. HN seems to be stuck in naval gazing* mode. *navel gazing.
It was informative to note that the bulge of 'years of coding' for [OK .. participating] HN hackers is the 10+ year set.
It would be interesting to see a 3-dim space mapping to years of {hacking, business (startup), investing (vc)} and see how the HN clusters manifest.
Since dinosaurs roamed the datacenter! I voted 20+ since that is how long I've been programming for a living, if you include back to high school (BASIC on a RSTS/E time share) change it to 30+.
This is tough because I started as a designer who just wanted to make sure my designs worked like I wanted - hacking together what I could find. I slowly developed an understanding of Javascript pre-jQuery, so I was learning the DOM because I had to. Then, I got into Flash development which, at the time, was AS2. If you design and develop, AS3 was/is joy. Not because it was Flash, but because AS3 is close to JS (AS3 is actually a ECMA dialect). Since, I've become pretty good with JS, Ruby, PHP, C#. It's hard to really nail down an exact year since I wouldn't know if it would be appropriate to call what I did years ago "programming".
My Dad and I started with a Basic time sharing system in the early 1960s that was occasionally available Saturday mornings. Then in the summer of 1966 when I was in high school I took a FORTRAN extension class at a local university: punched cards :-)
I guess it depends on how you look at it. I first started programming 20 years ago as a kid playing around with GW-BASIC and then moving on to Pascal. It was all playing around and teaching myself based on stuff I found on various BBS'. I was intrigued right away and programming just became a passion since I could write my own programs and make the computer do what I wanted it to do. Professionally though, I've been programming for about 15 years - though I feel that I've only really become a good programmer in the last 5 or so years.