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Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#11

Post by dferr »

I learned to program through a family member in a rather different way. My grandfather, who had since passed away, always talked to me about all the engineering feats he worked on at JPL. I was 12 when he died. He left me all of his computers and manuals, 5 and 7 inch floppy disks, and everything from MS-DOS to books that basically amounted to datasheets for the 68000, 8080, 8086, Z80, and a few other CPUs. most of what he left me was 16-bit era coding material, but it didn't matter, the principles were the same. In a school of kids that knew nothing about programming, knowing how to work with things that made adults head spin, made me feel special. I knew by the beginning of high school that i wanted to program.

I'll never forget all that my grandfather taught me, even though it was taught posthumously.

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#12

Post by tikhonj »

One of my parents was a programmer and yet nobody mentored me!

Which probably explains why my dad is a systems programmer writing drivers for Windows and I'm using Haskell on Linux to do programming language stuff with a healthy dose of PL theory. Hard to imagine any way to be so different while staying in the same field.

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#13

Post by k-mcgrady »

It would be interesting to see this split down by age too. It's less likely the parent of someone learning to code in the 70's/80's was a programmer. It was also probably a lot more difficult to learn to code back then without a mentor. Now that's not too big of a problem thanks to the internet.

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#14

Post by tluyben2 »

I got introduced to programming because my dad was a programmer, but besides him being excellent and math and checking sourcelists against magazines after I typed them in, he didn't really answer much questions in that regard. I learned most when I was 7 or 8 begin 80s by copying lists to my computer (because my father was a programmer and then manager we had computers very early) and then changing them. After a while I changed then so much that they were something else and I was able to start from scratch. Most of that was basic / assembly but I never had issues progressing to OO or functional languages after that.

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#16

Post by porlw »

My mother was a computer programmer. She worked on big iron (PL/1) but had no interest in programming away from the office, so I wouldn't say she mentored me.

My mentor was my father, a chemist. He showed me how to program BASIC on the lab computer that he sometimes brought home at weekends. That was a Commodore Pet, I was about 8 at the time.

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#17

Post by chrismorgan »

The options offered here are significantly disconnected from the question. The possession of a programming parent need not be connected with the acquisition of the art in oneself (though I would hazard that it is still likely to be an influencing factor).

My Dad is a programmer, but I and my two elder brothers all developed the curiosity for such matters and learned programming on our own with no assistance from our Dad or each other (my eldest brother began at about seven, my elder brother and I following suit at a slightly earlier age; I was five or six when I began). But I suppose it was Dad who ensured that there were a couple of books on BASIC for us to learn from.

So I can answer:

- One of my parents was a programmer.

- Another close family member was a programmer.

- No one person mentored me as I learned to program.

- And, of course, that term which ever eludes accurate definition: "Other".

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#18

Post by Bzomak »

I was lucky enough to learn the BASICs from my father. He, being a mathematician and having dabbled with programming at university, would play around with his own things on the computer in the evening, and I was rather interested in watching him create simple graphical things on the screen.

I think that my first experience was messing around with VRML, learning the mathematical ideas necessary for 3D world manipulation. Once my father saw that I was interested, he showed me some tutorials and documentation (downloaded onto the computer as the internet connection was horrendous), and I gradually learnt to create worlds. The programming part of VRML was the ECMAScript that one could use to control the objects, with which I was able to create and control a Rubik's cube, plot the solar system and stars from star catalogues, and generate patterns using L-Systems. From there, I was introduced to Basic4GL, and then was able to access various programs in some of my father's old fractal books, with explanations from him when needed. The beauty of recursion followed!

I experienced MATLAB, Java, and my favourite, C, at university. All of which was was too newfangled for my father to know anything about. But without his guiding hand when I was younger, I would never have discovered the ever-linked joys and frustrations of programming, and taken the courses that I did later on in life. I count myself lucky that I had someone available to answer my questions and keep me interested, otherwise I would probably have got bored and annoyed far too soon and quit before I'd really got started!

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#19

Post by katzgrau »

I had a friend who claimed he was an elite hacker (we were both 13). I wanted to be an elite hacker too, so I borrowed his book on Visual Basic 6.

As it turns out, he was not an elite hacker, and I wasn't going to become one by learning VB.

That said, it set me on a path (and maybe pattern) of self-learning that I think only the internet made possible. My real programming mentors were some cool folks on some online bulletin boards, who helped out serious n00bs like me along the way.

My parents were computer illiterate (I must have been the last kid in my 'hood to get a computer), and they never thought my little programming hobby would develop into anything of use!

Now I'm 27, have had a fun ride so far, and have to credit it to some power users on, wait for it, extremevisualbasicforum.com

PS: Of course, I moved away from that and like most at HN, do back-end/front-end of webapps now.

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#20

Post by lelandbatey »

My dad was a programmer for about 5 years back in the 70's but has been a lawyer for the past 25+ years. So I don't think that counts.

However, I do think I ended up with some kind of "origin bonus" because I grew up in Redmond Washington surrounded by programmers. That gave me a mindset and style of problem solving very conducive to programming I think.

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