Poll: When did you start programming in your free time? • Hacker News Board

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#41

Post by iliis » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

lordlicorice wrote: post #33

ordinary wrote: post #12

When I was 15, I had to get a TI-83 for school. There was a fairly lively program trading scene, so I got a handful from friends. The 'EDIT' menu proved too tempting for me to resist and, TI-BASIC being what it is, everything went downhill from there. Now, I don't think I could write anything in TI-BASIC to save my life. Thank goodness.

I think that the TI-83 is basically the perfect programming environment for novice programmers. All of the functions and language constructs are tokens accessible only through menus. They're all listed in menus, and it's very easy to wonder what the "For" statement does, for example, after you scroll past it for the hundredth time. If you give a 12-year-old a Python repl, then they'll be paralyzed. There's just too m…

Yes, I think that this an important point. I learned programming with QBASIC which had a manual included. I learned a lot just by trying to figure out all these commands.

Another thing that may greatly help is auto-completion. Type some random stuff and look what the IDE thinks it is.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#42

Post by iliis » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 5:14 PM UTC

Vitaly wrote: post #8

started at about 12 by participating in a Logo "course" in a monthly youth magazine. I don't think I thought about it as "programming" back then, it was more or less in the same category as solving math puzzles and stuff.

Cool! We have a professor at my university who leads a project where students go to schools and teach the kids logo. (I just started with them, and so far it's a lot of fun and also quite a challenge.)

May I ask, what sort of programs you wrote? Interactive stuff, drawings, calculations? And what kind of topics/challenges did you like most?

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#43

Post by wildtype » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 5:15 PM UTC

I learn programming since 15, but i realy do programming during my free time recently when i'm an undergrad student. I'm a i spent my time observating animal; measuring plant, trees, and microclimate; analyzing gene expression or culturing microbe on college. There's no need to do programming seriously, so i write code just for fun, solving project euler or other problemset.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#44

Post by hsmyers » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

Had to wait until after the Vietnam thing plus 8 years as an art major. When I walked across campus and sat down in the keypunch room I very shortly began to spend all of my time there. This was before you could have a machine at home so I'll count the non-class time as 'free' :)

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#45

Post by statictype » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 7:26 PM UTC

At 12. Using GW Basic on a 286.

    10 PRINT "TEST"
    20 GOTO 10

I hadn't mastered the concept of breaking out of the program so I reset the computer. And then stupidly entered the same program again to make sure it, you know, wasn't a bug or something.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#46

Post by aaronpk » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 7:53 PM UTC

At 8. I found my mom's "GW Basic" book and started making little programs that were quizzes or played little songs.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#47

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 8:00 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#48

Post by pan69 » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 8:33 PM UTC

I remember being about 10 or 11 ('82/'83) and one of my friends had a C64. I used to go over to his house and play games on a green fluorescent display. He also showed me how he could make the computer output my name over and over again. I was mesmerized.

From then on I kept nagging my parents to buy one for me too.

When I was about 13 my father finally got a computer, through work. It wasn't a C64 like my friend had. It was an Olivetti XT x86 running at 8Mhz (most XT's at the time ran at 4.77Mhz). A massive gray box.

Over the next few years I learned BASIC then x86 assembly. By the early '90 the European Demo scene was in full swing. Good memories.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#49

Post by pan69 » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 8:33 PM UTC

I remember being about 10 or 11 ('82/'83) and one of my friends had a C64. I used to go over to his house and play games on a green fluorescent display. He also showed me how he could make the computer output my name over and over again. I was mesmerized.

From then on I kept nagging my parents to buy one for me too.

When I was about 13 my father was finally got a computer, through work. It wasn't a C64 like my friend had. It was an Olivetti XT x86 running at 8Mhz. A massive gray box.

Over the next few years I learned BASIC then x86 assembly. By the early '90 the European Demo scene was in full swing. Good memories.

Re: Poll: When did you start programming in your free time?

#50

Post by mansr » Sun, Mar 04, 2012, 8:39 PM UTC

iliis wrote: post #38

GreekOphion wrote: post #14

When you were 12 or younger how did you learn how to program? I was 16 when I started programming as a hobby and I had a programming class. I wish I started programming when I was 12.

I think I was 11 or so when I went to a summer camp with my new laptop (an old thing that I got for free on the fleamarket). The idea was to play games on it - unfortunately it hadn't any on it. One of the parents there then remebered that there's often some sort of BASIC preinstalled on these DOS/Win3.11-machines which normally had some demo-code (including games). It turned out that there was indeed one (Gorillas,…

I also found the gorilla game and had much more fun adding various "improvements" than actually playing it.