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Related: are there any 2nd or 3rd generation programmers around? My both parents are professional software engineers. (Waiting for someone to go: "I am a direct descendant of Ada Lovelace, now get off my lawn")
Started at age 7 on a C64. I learned binary before I could multiply because you needed to understand binary to create multi-colored sprites on the C64. I made a game where you drove a car and avoided things, then another where you drove a spaceship and avoided things, then another where you shot arrows at moving targets. That last game was the first one I wrote where the goal was to hit things, a major departure for…
Why is that?
Related: are there any 2nd or 3rd generation programmers around? My both parents are professional software engineers. (Waiting for someone to go: "I am a direct descendant of Ada Lovelace, now get off my lawn")
My father was the "it guy" for a swiss engineering firm in sweden, lots of *nix and vms stuff.
had the vic 20, then c64, then amiga, then 386, 486 and onwards at home, I was probably 6-7 years old when I started playing. Like another poster higher up, had to learn binary pretty fast to make rasters and sprites etc. lots of fun over the years.
But, in reply to your question, yes, I am 2nd generation, something I actually liked to point out in interviews early in my career.
I think the first time I tried programming was when I was simply looking at QBasic code, astonished how Nibbles and Gorillas work and thought, "these characters I see on the screen before running the game are what make the game function? If so, how?" This was on my father's 486/33 I believe, although I barely remember his 386 which could have been what it was on. Regardless, I was probably 5 or 6 and I tried messing…
And most of the programming I learnt was from the snippets of code in the QBasic help files.
Started at age 7 on a C64. I learned binary before I could multiply because you needed to understand binary to create multi-colored sprites on the C64. I made a game where you drove a car and avoided things, then another where you drove a spaceship and avoided things, then another where you shot arrows at moving targets. That last game was the first one I wrote where the goal was to hit things, a major departure for…
> Despite the advances in tech, kids today who want to learn to program have it much harder. Why is that?
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 by quite a bit.
~1982 - Basic and TMS9900 Assembler on TI99/4A
~1985 - C, C++ and Pascal on Amiga 1000
Nowadays, mostly C++ and Python