I started with Basic on an Apple ][, followed by 6502 assembly. In community college, Pascal, Fortran and C. At some point in university,C++,APL, Matlab and Perl4. As well, shell scripting (including awk and sed), and Perl5 once it became widespread. Oh, also Java, Scheme and 68k assembly. Many of these were for coursework and I would not use again. Python at some point in my professional career. These days I use Python and/or shell scripting most of the time, followed by C (and C++ as a necessary evil). I'm still hoping to have a long lasting career without having to suffer Java professionally.
Poll: How long have you been programming?
171–180 of 329 posts
Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?
#172I think how long you are programming should start with the time when you first got paid / have customer for your development , all before is learning but IMHO there is huge difference
myself , started when I was 14 , got paid to program when I was 16 , closing to 30 years of programming , this year
Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?
#173I chose 10+, although I wrote my first program in 1982 when I was fifteen (it was a calculation of Mendel's inheritance series, written in BASIC on an old HP 2000 series). But then I had a break until about 1995 when I started writing code again, first in HTML (so no real programming), then moving to Javascript and eventually server-side Web development. As if anyone cares. :D
Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hypothesis is that the 'stack' is much taller. Back when all you needed was QBasic to "learn to code", "learning to code" meant reproducing other software you used on a daily basis. Software is generally much more polished now, and it requires much more time and work to get it so polished (assuming it's at all complex). I'm not saying I agree with this. But the situation is definitely different from 10 years ago…
I don't think that's true. NOTEPAD.EXE and Firefox is all you need to start with HTML and JavaScript, for example. Microsoft gives away Visual Studio for free download, there are all the open source languages (ActiveState does great distros for Windows) etc etc. It's a cultural shift. Kids these days are consumers, not producers.
Totally agree. You're describing how I started... for a kid wanting to write a web page over 10 years ago you were lucky to have access to lissaexplains.com & w3schools.com. Nowadays you've got stackoverflow, smashing mag network, nettuts etc - not to mention a whole shitload of resources offering free code / designs / icons, ready to roll stuff like wordpress, etc.
Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nibbles and Gorillas was the first piece of code that I saw and was amazed how it worked. It taught me why we need to use functions and subs. And as a 13 year old it was fascinating to understand those concepts. And most of the programming I learnt was from the snippets of code in the QBasic help files.
Yup, the first lump of non-line-numbered BASIC I'd ever seen. I learned on the Spectrum 48K and when I switched to PCs I kept all of the limitations with me until I read those two.
Oh those nights! Waiting 15 minutes for a program to load from a tape recorder just to find out that tape is damaged at the end ;-)
Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, but if you wanted to program a VIC-20, you were literally POKEing 6502 opcodes as hex numbers into memory addresses - the development tool VICMON cost extra, and even then you still had to know the mnemonics. And people of my generation still did it. And kids today have everything handed to them on a plate, they just aren't interested.
If you wanted to program a VIC-20, you opened the manual, read the preface, which starts like this: "You are about to meet friendly computer! Friendly in price, friendly in size, to use and learn on experience. Most important you don't have to be computer programmer, or even typist, to use it! If you're first time computerist, this manual will provide an excellent introduction to computing. Unlike most instruction ma…
User was equated with programmer
Exactly. That's what I mean by cultural shift.
Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?
#177Atari basic in 1991 when I was 9 (remember simple FOR loops printing "trees"), BASIC with sprites on Yamaha MSX [1] consoles in 1993/1994, grew up on ZX Spectrum clones (Russian Hobbit [2]) since 1992 (including dabbling in Logo), GWBasic since 1993, QBasic a year later, Pascal since 1994 and dabbled in C in 1995. Clearly remember pointers sucking: having to figure out whether to pass in char * or char whether to stick an & in front of the string, etc.
ZX Spectrum was the shit though, as a kid. It had everything you wanted: BEEP command to make tones (so you could make music!) and user-definable 8x8 characters [3]. I remember sitting down with graph paper, drawing a grid of 8x8 spaces, outlining something neat like a helicopter, then tracing out the pixels. Then it was trivial to just "PRINT" your custom characters and make things move around.
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX 2 - http://www.interface1.net/zx/clones/hobbit.html 3 - http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/zxmanchap14.htm...
Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?
#178Although I had high school exposure to FORTRAN, I began my life-long love of programming in 1970 at Stony Brook University where I had many programming classes that involved the IBM 360/67 and DEC PDP-10. I learned all the major languages at the time, including Algol, PL/1, FORTRAN IV, Snobol, Basic Assembly Language, and my favorite back then - Lisp, i.e. Maclisp on the PDP-10. My first job was programming for a bank in COBOL, and I continued with commercial data processing for two decades. I bought a TRS-80 in 1978 and programmed it in Basic as well as assembler. Likewise I built and programmed an x86 PC every couple of years since they came out. In the early 1990's, the utility company I worked for switched new projects to Smalltalk. And in the mid 1990's I learned Java. In 1999, I began working for Cycorp in Austin where I returned to lisp, and a bit of Java. Since 2006 I have been programming Java and some JavaScript.
At 60 years old, I look back on a long career of programming - with the most exciting work coming late in life as a founder of a tech startup - Android, websockets, semantic web, natural language processing, and programmable web. Its just great! I wonder what the next couple of decades will bring ...
Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
yet there are a lot of concepts they need to digest before they jump into the html/js world. it already means they need to learn two languages (html and js), interaction between them , etc... I'm not even mentioning things like - open notepad, save the file, make sure you get the extension right, fire up the browser, click open (why not in address bar? oh yeah, you can, but tell a kid the file:/// business and see if…
I would recommend not trying to teach for loops etc... Show them how to tie a function to an image to make it move across the screen as a building block to make a game and they will find it interesting. Maybe start with flash/actionscript so they can see (click image > write code for image > image does stuff)
unfortunately in the selection that I have of 8 (mine), 9 (not mine) and 10 (mine) none are bright enough to grasp the concept of a 'sprite' yet, i'm not even talking about relating code to that sprite. flash/actionscript? ho many steps are there between typing something and actually getting stuff appear on the screen? I've written 2-3 simple swf's, and it caused my head to spin... you think a kid could do it? on their own?...
friend of mine ('owner' of the 9yo), tried some sort of python environment which was supposed to do just that (i think it's this: http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/en/rur.htm, but not sure), but failed - quite limited in what it does, or get way too complicated if you want to tweak something.
so the whole experiment was a flop really...
Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?
#180Fortran in College in the 70's. First programming job in NYC 1983, writing EDX\EDL on the IBM Series/1 and c on the PC.