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Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program?

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Re: Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program?

#2

Post by duncan_bayne »

7.

I was coding in Amstrad BASIC on a CPC 464. The program didn't work, because I didn't understand the difference between strings and numbers.

I wrote out my listing and took it to my teacher at school, to ask why my program didn't work.

This led to my first inkling that adults didn't have all the answers :)

My teacher had never used a computer before, didn't really understand the problem, and certainly couldn't solve it. To her immense credit she clearly explained all of those things at the time rather than bullshitting me, and suggested I try to find an adult with an interest in computers. Basically, she helped me develop me the skills to solve my problem.

Quite the formative experience, that was.

Re: Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program?

#6

Post by everslick »

10 or 11, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BASIC. most likly i started by typing in the examples from the book, working from there. changing lines of code, see what it does to the program. some two years later i got a c64. the basic was a lot worse, but it was the machine i got around my head to assembler, or at least machine code - because i did'nt understand the concept of the assembler, but i very well understood the machine-code-monitor in the final cartridge.

but rasterbars, and softscrollers with (stolen) musik and sprites on the bottom/top border, was as far as i ever got.

Re: Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program?

#7

Post by pshc »

Sometime around 7. At the public library, I found a book titled "How To Make Games." It went through the design and implementation of a text adventure game in BASIC, with a full program listing in the back. I discovered that our family computer had a copy of QBasic 1.0, and from there I was hooked.

Being a little kid, I never thought seriously about the future :)

Re: Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program?

#8

Post by S4M »

At 8 or 9 I wrote in an Amstrad CPC 464 a program in Basic that was moving the letters of my dad's company. I remember that at the time, I understood the for/next loop, but didn't think about the nested loop, so I wrote lots of code that could have been a two or three liners. Something like:

    FOR I=1 TO 100
    PLOT I,1
    PLOT I,2
    ...
    PLOT I,50
    NEXT

Re: Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program?

#9

Post by simonblack »

Quite old. I was in my mid 20s. But this was in the early 1970s.

It was a BASIC program. I was given about 20 80-column cards which I had mark with a thick black pen in the relevant positions. I then gave the pack back to the friend who had access to one of the early multi-user terminals in another town and who could run it. He was impressed that it ran perfectly without any syntax errors, but not that it was an infinite loop.

On the other hand, my first computer I had to build with a soldering-iron and a very large box of parts in 1979 and that's what finally enabled me to begin programming for real, in both BASIC and Assembly Language.

Re: Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program?

#10

Post by informatimago »

My first program on record is dated June 25th 1976; I was twelve. You may see it on an emulator of the Mitra-15 LSE system I wrote recently at:

http://nasium-lse.ogamita.com:8117/

then type (C-s = control-s):

C-s CH C-s /BOURG C-s AP C-s BOUR C-s LI C-s 1 C-s EX C-s 1 C-s

(LSE = Langage Symbolique d'Enseignement, a French programming language used in the 70s and 80s in the French schools). http://nasium-lse.ogamita.com

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