Never really learned it. Still struggling.
Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#12By endlessly asking #python on freenode how to do basic things like utilize a dictionary.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#13experimenting at home with qbasic + college
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#14ZZT! 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 :-)
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#15Never really learned it. Still struggling.
I bet you're better at it than you were before.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#16On the brand new and shiny 486 running dos and windows 3.1 that my father bought, on the qbasic language. With only a paper book as reference. No llm, no stackoverflow, no pageranked search engine, no internet, and not even Ctrl+F. In these days when you had a bug, you could chew on it for days.
>No llm, no stackoverflow, no pageranked search engine, no internet, and not even Ctrl+F.
Wait, MS QBasic had fantastic in built help, with examples. That is the best kind of help.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#17On the 6502, which a relative gifted me when I was around 9. The cool part was that they also gifted me a huge stack of boxes with C64 magazines in them that contained new games and programs the publishers found cool and wrote about. Then you could type in the code of those games and play or modify them, as a lot of them were commented codes.
The amazing part was the reader comment section in the end, where people were writing letters to the magazine publishers with their modifications to programs from one of the magazines before, so patches were literally transmitted via paper.
To me as a child, I never understood that this was programming. This was just how I could play games on the device.
Amazing memories with the C64, and I was so lucky to get one as a child because it was more common in the human generations before me. Getting a used 386 turbo as the second device was literally child's play when I was learning to write assembly for it when I discovered an assembler program on its hard drive.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#18experimenting at home with qbasic + college
anyone else bootleg quickbasic 4.5 so you could compile to executable?
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#19By endlessly asking #python on freenode how to do basic things like utilize a dictionary.
#javascript for me
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#20Using an 8051 on a breadboard writing ASM in a text editor and debugged with a tektronix storage oscilloscope. It was super fun.