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Poll: How long have you been programming?

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291–300 of 329 posts

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#293
I said 10+ years, started out when I was a wee lad "programming" a front end in DOS batch for my non-computer-literate dad, reading from a thick reference book and trying to figure out errorlevels..

I haven't really worked on any big projects, just little bits and pieces here and there. I just set up a github a couple months ago, and the only thing on it is some mIRC script that isn't really being updated anymore.

Kinda hesitate to call myself a programmer, feeling like that term is best used for people who do it for a living or have a great deal more experience than I do. Coder or scripter is probably more accurate :)

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#294
I started in 1990 [1]. Learned COBOL, courtesy of the Marines. Then was side-tracked into a series of billets where I did micro-computer repair, LAN, dBase III. Never had a job, since, where the title was 'programmer' but I've programmed regardless: scripts, dbase, blah blah blah.

[1] I would have started six years earlier in high school. But a (probably) well-meaning guidance counselor convinced methat I needed trigonometry or something to even begin thinking about programming a computer. So I took the basic 'intro to programming' class offered in 1983 at my high school and dropped the whole business.

Pity - I really _liked_ messing around with those Apples.

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#295
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend not trying to teach for loops etc... Show them how to tie a function to an image to make it move across the screen as a building block to make a game and they will find it interesting. Maybe start with flash/actionscript so they can see (click image > write code for image > image does stuff)

unfortunately in the selection that I have of 8 (mine), 9 (not mine) and 10 (mine) none are bright enough to grasp the concept of a 'sprite' yet, i'm not even talking about relating code to that sprite. flash/actionscript? ho many steps are there between typing something and actually getting stuff appear on the screen? I've written 2-3 simple swf's, and it caused my head to spin... you think a kid could do it? on the…

Hmm true, I always considered Flash/Actionscript to be dead simple (Drag image to the view => click on it and add code to make it do stuff) However maybe it's because I grew up loading 5.5inch floppys in a computer without a hard drive that only ran DOS. This is actually something I've been thinking about lately since my son is now 4 months old and I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to teach him this stuff, I grew up evolving with the technology so a terminal window does not feel foreign to me. How do you start from scratch in the age of iPads etc.. ?

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#297
post #109

I was looking for something and found an old green-bar print-out of an SPS program I wrote in 1971. This was at Gateway High School in Monroeville, Pa., the same school pg went to a few years later. I imagine they upgraded to a modern language like FORTRAN, COBOL, or PL/1 by the time pg rolled up his sleeves in that data center.

I went to Woodland Hills, graduated a few years ago. Spontaneously decided to click on the comments and was surprised to see this.

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#300
post #140

Nearly 17 years and still going on... Remember starting with a neat little FORTRAN Hack all the way back in college. The instructor nearly fell off his chair when saw the source code - one of my favorite moments.

That seems great fun. Could you elaborate on it? Or maybe it's too long ago..

in a certain version of FORTRAN (I think 77) you could do interesting things with code that spanned two lines (80 Chars) My code did this repeatedly - over and over leading to some unexpected results
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