Ask HN: What sparked your interest in programming?

I wanted to make SimCity allow you to invade the cities in the neighbourhood. Was 11 at the time. Still working on it.

I was in architecture school and the coolest stuff we were doing was building 3D structures with a program called Grasshopper. I learnt that the program was written in Python code, and thought "the people driving the thing I'm most excited about in Architecture are programmers, not Architects".

Before then it had not really clicked how much code was driving innovation all over the place.

Programming lets me foster ideals without reproducing to amount for like a serial sense of beginning and ending. If I make a new function I can put it anywhere and refer to it as I do so I dont have to pretend I can't be Einstein or Euler and get on with just completing the next steps for them. This applies to video games, music, science, dancing, fashion and even, dare I say it, reading, as a way to motivate myself without the need to compile that my mind isn't ready to replace words with meaning if not to let me benefit from it. Rather than confuse myself with programming as coding practices. Its essential now.

I liked computers and the idea of having a good job, so I decided to study computer science. By complete coincidence, I ended up liking it.

Are there are any games they play/might be interested in that have scripting facilities of some sort?

I got into tech of various flavors by learning to write RuneScape bots circa 2005-2009. There were a few publicly available Java reflection-based bot dev kits at the time, which was my initial entry point. I later got into more advanced programming topics by figuring out how the SDKs themselves worked and rolling my own, as the widely used free ones tended to get your accounts heuristically banned quite a lot. Sysadmin stuff when I got around to setting up proper remote bot farms, etc.

My example is somewhat more ethically dubious than a lot of similar-ish stories (e.g. blizzard rts mod development, Minecraft mods, etc.) but I've always found that "pure" intros to programming tend to lack an inherent motivating factor like what you can get with messing with games, whether it's to make something cool, skip a grind or generate some pocket money.