Ask HN: How did you learn to code? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#51

Post by BrenBarn » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

jaboostin wrote: post #14

ZZT! It had its own in-game editor and scripting language ZZT-OOP, which blew my mind as a kid. That was the gateway drug to Flash and ActionScript, HTML, IRC bots, Minecraft mods, and more. Self teaching by building something fun and exciting always worked the best for me. Back when coding was for fun and not money :-)

ZZT was pretty awesome. I wish I still had the games I wrote for it.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#52

Post by BrenBarn » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #5

neopets was definitely a factor, who else? And "hacking" school computers, windows use to let you make folder backgrounds with html, could do some funny stuff.

I used to go into Staples or Circuit City and go to the demo computers. I'd hit the reset button, boot into DOS, open up QBasic, and write a classic program along the lines of 10 PRINT "BRENBARN RULEZ!" 20 GOTO 10. Add a little spacing offset so it would create a wave-like pattern of text. Set it running and skedaddle.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#53

Post by BrenBarn » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

bibimsz wrote: post #18

bibimsz wrote: post #13

experimenting at home with qbasic + college

anyone else bootleg quickbasic 4.5 so you could compile to executable?

Oh yeah!

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#54

Post by mndgs » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:36 AM UTC

Played video games on ZX Spectrum and some Soviet computer at home. Wanted to learn to code games as a teen, took a course in Basic, very shallow. Then in high school some exposure to Turbo Pascal (90s), learned a bit, but wasn't great.

Then really learned Python in 2010s trying to solve a real-life problem - had to scrape an ecom website, used Scrapy. Now it's Go, quite complex projects, about to launch our SaaS startup.. took a while..

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#55

Post by localhostinger » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

In IT school back in 2008 (with 14). I had absolutely no idea about the school or programming, I was just knowing my way around computers, so I signed up for it. We started with C and I remember the first couple of weeks and exercises just doing stuff with printf. Then reading user input with scanf. It clicked pretty early for me, and I loved it.

From there on I was always learning faster and more at home as a hobby, I was mostly ahead in school. A friend and classmate and I coded so many different projects during that time (2D terminal game, PHP forum, PHP CMS that was actually productive for a few years, thereby also learning how the internet worked).

It's just crazy how lucky I got to be interested in this thing at the right time. "Back then" I feel you got so much more time to learn something well, mostly because things weren't changing at crazy speed.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#56

Post by chistev » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

Interesting that nobody yet has mentioned Bucky Roberts from The New Boston.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#57

Post by placebo » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:17 AM UTC

Basic on a RadioShack TRS-80. Guess I'm one of the older dinosaurs here.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#58

Post by burnt-resistor » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:18 AM UTC

By sitting in front of Turbo Pascal 6.0 and with trial-and-error, pre internet. (I was 12~13.)

https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/6x

System specs: https://pastebin.com/raw/yHqGgxhx

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#59

Post by daledavies » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

Playing with AMOS basic on the Amiga in the mid 90s, then later with pascal in college. Eventually came back to it with web development as a career.

Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?

#60

Post by pentaphobe » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:45 AM UTC

Was offline and had no tech people or resources around, but got access to an unused 286 which booted into a mysterious "C:\" prompt

Slowly worked out how navigate the system, then tried running the various built in things I found

One of these was QBASIC. Started reading through and messing with the example games which were part of the built-in QBASIC in MS-DOS

Reverse engineering how they worked gave a lot of the core concepts (variables, loops, procedures)

After writing a few (very) naff text adventures I stumbled across the intriguingly named "DEBUG" tool

Used debug to step through some of the other built in MSDOS utilities and try to work out what the mysterious symbols were doing (how I learnt assembler and machine code)

Later when I finally found BBSs I started debugging/disassembling some of the BBS mini-demos which were ubiquitous those days, which introduced me to manipulating graphical memory etc.. The smaller size of these, and fact that they were generally coded in assembler was much more useful than reading through compiled code

I do not recommend writing assembler in DEBUG, but wouldn't trade in the learning I got from exploring a total black box with no references or learning resources (beyond time and curiosity)

Felt like doing alchemy