Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?

When I was 12, I was in Vienna for a month. My family and two other families of Soviet immigrants were sharing a flat, waiting for our paperwork to clear so we could move on to our final destination.

My family had been trying to get out of Russia for 10 years, so I'd been taking English lessons since I was three.

The head of one of the other families was a programmer from Vilnius.

I taught him English and he taught me how to program in BASIC with pencil and paper. We did it at the kitchen table as I recall.

I saw a computer in a store window but we couldn't afford to buy it.

Next month we were in Ladispoli, Italy, and I had access to a Commodore plus 4. That's when I got a chance to try out my programs and learned about debugging.

My dad had purchased a Commodore 64 back in 1984 (I was 6). He bought it so he could create spreadsheets, etc. to track his budget or other household things. It came with a book on BASIC, which was built into the computer (in lieu of an 'operating system'). I began reading and copying the sample programs in the book, and slowly taught myself how to program.

One day, I was being punished for something, so my dad took away the external floppy drive for a week so I wouldn't be able to play any of my games. I remembered that I could just write my own, so I wrote a simple Hangman game. It took me 2 days, but I still did it. (Again, I was 6) Although, Hangman is not much fun when you're the one who wrote it an you know what the words could possibly be. But, I digress...

Anyway, my parents were very impressed that I had taught myself how to do this all on my own. Years later, in high school, they bought me my own PC (an IBM clone with a 386DX-40 processor, 4MB RAM, etc.) that I used to learn Microsoft QuickBASIC (a more advanced version of BASIC than came with the Commodore), C, and eventually C++. From there, I studied Computer Science in college, and the rest is history.

Someone donated pet commodores to all the libraries in my county. My mother would go visit my sister at work every Sunday. across the street was one of those libraries. My mother happily dropped me off as trying to keep a 12 year old boy from being annoying was a tall order, and I certainly had no trouble being a whiny brat when bored. Along with the computers were some games, one of them being a roguelike. The librarian knew the load and run commands, enough to get me started. I discovered the break key, and list command on my own. I had an intuition that the code listed could be manipulated, therefore if I learned BASIC I could rule the game. There was a manual on PET BASIC on the shelves, and that was that.

> Although, Hangman is not much fun when you're the one who wrote it an you know what the words could possibly be.

Priceless. As someone whose first program calculated the value of a pair of resistors I can only conclude you were way ahead of me at 6 when I was 12...

back in second year of my CS class, my professor showed an sample HTML program that marquees text from left to right.. Decided!!!