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Poll: When did you start programming?

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: Poll: When did you start programming?

#15
Like a few other posters here, I got my start in QBASIC (kids want instant visual feedback, and QBASIC certainly did that). Parents bought a computer, then forbid us to play anything resembling a game. So I wrote my own (and also discovered Gorillas). I think the first thing I built was a slot machine making use of random numbers.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming?

#16
post #12

There shouldn't be an apostrophe between the number and the 's'. "Will learn in the 10s" should just be "10s", as some people may have already started programming in the past 12 months

The usual answer to the date controversy is that since there wasn't a year 0, each decade must be 1-10, so the 10s start in 2011.

I'm comfortable with saying, instead, that the first decade had 9 years and the first century 99 years, and so on, but other people seem to object more. :)

Re: Poll: When did you start programming?

#20
post #12

There shouldn't be an apostrophe between the number and the 's'. "Will learn in the 10s" should just be "10s", as some people may have already started programming in the past 12 months

The usual answer to the date controversy is that since there wasn't a year 0, each decade must be 1-10, so the 10s start in 2011. I'm comfortable with saying, instead, that the first decade had 9 years and the first century 99 years, and so on, but other people seem to object more. :)

Perhaps overly ironic given my pedantic tags before, but the year 0 issue is something where I see no point being technical. As far as the population of the world is concerned, 2000 was the start of the new millenium, etc.

Either way: while you can claim that 2011 is the start of the next decade, 2010 is definitively the start of "the 10s". I was born in `90, I would listen to an argument that I was born in the same decade as someone who was born in `85, but to say I was born in the eighties would be undeniably incorrect.

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