Poll: When did you start programming? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: When did you start programming?

33 pointsxd66 comments

As a new decade dawns I thought it would be interesting to see when people of hn started programming.

In BASIC (the horror) when I was maybe 6 or 7. I tried making text adventure games by writing out every if/then branch explicitly...

Been there. Ah, those infinitely nested INKEY$...

Are you me?

I was lucky enough that my grandparents bought me one of those computers that hooked up to my TV, and it had a BASIC interpreter on it. I still have the manual...

I still have the computer too! (Sinclair ZX Spectrum+)

Was it a Commodore 64? That's what I had.

I attribute my code reading abilities to navigating my own GOTO spaghetti while trying to recreate ZORK.

Same.. my dad had a big book on BASIC programming and we just got our first computer. I've been hooked ever since.

Same here, BASIC, 5 or 6. Text adventure games, lemonade stand, and so on.

Dijkstra says, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." But he complained about nearly everything.

I never really got very far with BASIC anyway, and started reading about OOP when I was maybe 12? Hopefully I was inoculated in time...

I taught myself C++ from the Borland Turbo C++ compiler manual and library books when I was 12-13ish. And later, Perl, then Python, then ...

A poll on "how old were you when you started" would also be interesting.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048989

It started as a game. We were reading about disassembling and competing was fun. Those were the days of +ORC reversing tutorials. I wanted to know how computers worked and discovering Linux was the next big step in that direction.

Later C,C++, python, objective C..., I think understanding what the computer does with every line gives you an advantage. Some things become obvious to you but not to other programmers without hard assembly experience.

Technically I was exposed to Logo as a kid, but we never kept the computer in our classroom for long. My first exposure to Visual Basic was in 1997 for one semester(freshman in high school), and started seriously programming in C++ in 1999(start of senior year). I do mostly .Net now.. I still feel like I have a long way to go. I never knew how to get developer tools and good documentation till my last year of school. I wish I knew sooner.

I don't know how this came about, but my elementary school had (the gifted kids) programming in LOGO in 2nd and 3rd grades. It was never explained as computer programming, more like a game to make a turtle draw cool things.

I'd love to meet the school administrator who decided this was important and buy him or her a beer. It started my entire passion for computers and programming.

My Dad got me a ahem pirated copy of visual basic 6 when I was about 14 in 00/01

While I'd hate to develop anything in VB these days, it did kick off my interest in software development. Especially when my friend was into it as well so we'd make stuff and share it with each other.

Java developer by trade these days, and I use Ruby or Objective-C for personal development.

Not to pile on the guilt, but I swept yards when I was 11 to raise the money to buy Visual Basic for DOS 1.0 when it came out ;-) Unfortunately, the joke was entirely on me in the end!

I also got VB4-6 pirated somewhere around 1998. My dad got me to read a book on VB4 and down the rabbit hole I went (I had dabbled before, but just scripting apps like mIRC and a few DOS batch files).

Your poll is broken. I read my first programming book (a programmed instruction text on machine programming) in the mid-60s. This was neither before the 60s nor in the 70s.

1977, 6502 assembly language (hand assembled machine code really) on a KIM-1. 1k RAM, 6 digit 7 segment display and hex keypad. Still have that computer and it still works.

Early 80's: C64 BASIC & 6502 ASM =)

Same here. I vividly remember entering type-in MLX programs[1] to the C64. I later learned C64 BASIC.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ComputesGazetteProgramPage...

I started in 2000 (at the age of 10) with my old father laptop (running Windows 3.1). I hit the Qbasic icon because I liked the hummer image and wanted to see what's inside. Really, nothing was interesting, but my father introduced me to few commands (print, if, then...). Few days later, I started reading the documentation in English, even though I didn't know English.

Like a few other posters here, I got my start in QBASIC (kids want instant visual feedback, and QBASIC certainly did that). Parents bought a computer, then forbid us to play anything resembling a game. So I wrote my own (and also discovered Gorillas). I think the first thing I built was a slot machine making use of random numbers.

'91, first with QBASIC, and then with GW-BASIC because I couldn't get QBASIC's editor to exit after running a script. :)

All I wanted for my seventh birthday was a computer. My parents got me a second hand ZX81 which came with an excellent user manual [1] which was mainly a tutorial for programming in BASIC.

[1] http://web.ukonline.co.uk/sinclair.zx81/

Been programming for over 20 years professionally.

I received my Commodore VIC-20 when I was 11 years old. :-D

http://www.dcs-media.com/Archive/20-20-top-20-programming-le...

On a vic 20 that we hooked up to the living room's tv, we got it when I was 7 ad played games on it. Then I started programming when I was 8.

It had all sorts of characters like borders and symbols that made character (think ascii) graphics work not too bad. Peeking and poking memory was fun too.

1975 in BASIC on Dartmouth College's time sharing system. I was 13 at the time and the local schools had installed a handful of mechanical teletypes (chukka chukka chukka chukka ding chukka...). It was a beautiful thing!

1977: I learned BASIC from typing in programs in "What To Do After You Hit Return" and experimenting by changing things. On a Processor Technology SOL.

My dad also had a BYTE-8 (I see that's not even in wikipedia, I think it was an IMSAI clone) and had to manually enter the machine code for the paper-tape loader via a set of paddle switches, one byte at a time (one switch per bit, plus a switch for "set"). Then he had to pull the paper tape through the reader at just the right speed, or he had to start over. Good times!

I started tinkering with programming in the 80s (Vic20, Commodore64, AtariST), but didn't get into it seriously or for work (Assembly, C, C++, Pascal, Java) until the early 90s.

I was 14 when I began tinkering with the BASIC code of the DOS 'Gorillas' and 'Nibbles' games. I loved changing the color schemes and making the bananas fly ridiculously fast.

I liked making the bombs blow up ridiculously huge for the Gorillas game.

In the 90s with QBASIC ... then Turbo Pascal ... etc

I started with Commodore 64 using Basic in 1993, maybe 1994. Than I've got PC with QBasic, later Pascal, C++ and Delphi.

Professionally since late 90s, but since late 80s on Commodore 16 and Amstrad CPC. Then Qbasic on a PC. Good times.

Logo when I was 7, in the mid eighties.

Picking up cocoa as my first language over the past few months. Been scripting with jQuery for a while.

If I wasn't such a know-it-all kid, I could answer 90's (99). Instead, I told my dad Python is stupid and I don't want to be a programmer or study computer science.

...then I went on a few years later to study CS and now I use Python.

I wrote my first code on a TRS-80 model 1 with level one basic and a cassette drive. Our high school math teacher got us permission to use the local University mainframe to learn fortran. That was in 9th grade in 1978. I was 14.

MacPascal on a 512k Mac with 20MB of hard disk, probably around 1985-86.

I didn't do anything useful with it, but that editor had the weirdest syntax highlighting ever - a mix of bold/italic/outline for symbols/variables/errors.

There shouldn't be an apostrophe between the number and the 's'.

"Will learn in the 10s" should just be "10s", as some people may have already started programming in the past 12 months

</pedantic>

The usual answer to the date controversy is that since there wasn't a year 0, each decade must be 1-10, so the 10s start in 2011.

I'm comfortable with saying, instead, that the first decade had 9 years and the first century 99 years, and so on, but other people seem to object more. :)

Perhaps overly ironic given my pedantic tags before, but the year 0 issue is something where I see no point being technical. As far as the population of the world is concerned, 2000 was the start of the new millenium, etc.

Either way: while you can claim that 2011 is the start of the next decade, 2010 is definitively the start of "the 10s". I was born in `90, I would listen to an argument that I was born in the same decade as someone who was born in `85, but to say I was born in the eighties would be undeniably incorrect.

That is ridiculous. You can say that the the second decade of the 21st Century started in 2011... but to pretend that the 201x decade started in 2011 is not even wrong.

I started hacking with QBasic before the age of 10, in the early 1990's.

Hmmm! 90s: 195, 00s: 157.

Assuming that trend continues, I'd not speculate that there were more learners in the 90s; but where, if anywhere, are the learners from the 00s hanging out?

Half of generation nought need another five years time, I suppose. Alternatively, all the toddlers I've met yet have successfully hidden their 1337 h4xx0r1ng skills from me. Probably have a secret agenda, them darn toddlers. Holding back the singularity until we've died of old age, I bet.

00s. Unlike many posters here, I only started programming while at the university with c as my first language. I spend most of my time coding in python and javascript though.

... the zx-81 and basic was my first weapon .. 1982 or 1983

Not long after the start of 2001 at around 10 in Visual Basic.

Edit: Was LOGO the one with the turtle? I remember having fun with that in primary school.

On a DEC VAX system in the early 1980s.

FORTRAN was the 1st language I programmed in, then quickly followed by a more immersive bout of Pascal.

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709074

It was the late 90's and I started learning PHP3 and HTML. Then soon enough I started reading about BASIC, C, Unix, Linux...

Er, what about IN the 60s?? 1965 for me.

yeah, sorry about that, I should have proof read it. Also messed up on the apostrophes.

80s - TI994A

Boolean algebra (does that count?) in '59-60, Fortran in '63-64 (on a NASA 709x).

Kindergarten, late '80s.

Kindergarten, seriously?

I started at 7, and I though that was on the early side.

It's possible. Kindergarten is age 5-6.

I started with LOGO in the first grade( age 6 ), if that can be considered a programming language. I was poring over my dad's purple 8086 book by age 8 and writing some basic assembly programs.

Kids' minds are incredibly plastic. One year difference, given the wide variability of interest and abilities in a given population pool, kindergarten is not difficult to believe.

amos when I was 10, then turbo pascal when i was 11 :)

80s

DB2, BASIC for games into cassete tapes. ;)

90s

TI 86 !

80's

Prime number sieve on an HP-11C. Gotos and labels baby!

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