How did you learn to program?

One day my dad brought home a reference manual for TRS-80 BASIC. It had all the statements in alphabetical order. I read it front to back and spent a couple years scrawling programs on paper, until finally the IBM PC was introduced and he bought one. I wrote a bunch of BASICA programs, including half a text adventure in a horrible mess of spaghetti. I spent hours with printouts spread across the floor, tracking bugs through thickets of GOTOs.

Then Dad got Turbo Pascal and I discovered the joys of structured programming. For my first project I wrote Conway's Life, and was shocked when it worked perfectly the first time. I never wrote another line of BASICA.

I went to college, thought I didn't want to program for a living and got a degree in anthropology. A few years later I had all kinds of crazy ideas for software running around in my head, plus I was tired of being broke. I bought a machine and some books, learned sql and classic asp, and got a job easily because it was the height of the dotcom boom.

After a few years I discovered that writing endless data entry screens wasn't that exciting, and started learning some real computer science. Still working on that.

My dad bought an MSX computer and some programming manuals when I was a young boy. I liked it more than him :) started with just typing over listings from the books and magazines (that was common back then).

Later on I started changing things and trying what would happen. And trying to make games do different things. And wrote quite some programs on my own, like simple games, but soon found what you could do with BASIC was quite limited. But it was kind of the only choice back then, apart from assembly. Somewhat after that I started learning some Z80 assembly from a little book of opcodes.

Much later we got an MSX2, then an Atari ST, then finally a PC (286), man those were crappy compared to the ST :) I learned Pascal using Turbo Pascal, then C using Turbo C (Borland was big back then and everything was Turbo). Learned a lot from other BBS users and TXTfiles.

I get very nostalgic when I think about these things.