Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?

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I'm always impressed when I read that some people here started coding at a really young age.

Makes me wonder what motivated them to continue as well.

I personally learned at 16, so not super young. I guess what motivated me is that I knew nothing about my computer and wanted to better understand how it worked.

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When I was around 11 I watched the matrix, hackers, and I think maybe played some video games that made hacking seem cool on a superficial level.

At school I searched (I believe it was on yahoo) "how to become a hacker"

The result that came back was Eric S. Raymond's post with that title. He actually keeps it up to date.

The older version was a little more vitriolic but it really hasn't changed that much otherwise. It's full of lots of fun hacker culture stuff. Encouraging curiosity, talking about the history of the word "hacker", vaugely anti-authority at every turn.

It doesn't shy away from the technical either. It had extremely practical advice like learn http, tcp/ip, python, Linux, and all kinds of stuff like that.

I had never run across anything like that before and I was instantly hooked by everything about it and started messing around with programming languages among other things outlined in the guide.

I followed it like an instruction manual and of course made up my own syllubus too as I went along.

Fond memories.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

My family got a BBC B when I was about 6 or 7. I programmed a few bits and pieces in BASIC. Even got my parents to buy me Input magazine [1], which I only partly read.

What really got me started was seeing the Bapaug demo [2] when I got an Atari ST. That motivated me to play around with BASIC again. Which was frustratingly slow. I switched over to 68000. Teaching myself from some sample code. I created my first commercial program [3] a few years later with a couple of friends. 30 years ago at the back end of this year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_(magazine)

[2] https://demozoo.org/productions/65653/

[3] https://demozoo.org/productions/78840/

I self-taught at 7 on a TRS-80 that I could use in the summertime, typing in the examples and then modifying them to make (pretty terrible) variants or games.

Got my first computer (Atari 1200XL) a little after a friend got an Apple ][. We learned by typing in games from books and magazines and modifying them.

I sold my first program around age 11 for $20. It was 6502 assembly subroutine to calculate an XMODEM checksum for a BBS. They had BASIC code that worked okay for a 300 baud modem, but took too long to calculate the checksum for 1200 baud modems. That was hand assembled from op codes in a book and represented almost $1/byte of object code. (Imagine if we got paid that much now. :) )

I (mistakenly) thought I was pretty good until I showed up at college and couldn’t breeze through an intro level actual programming class, so “starting at 7” didn’t really mean that much in terms of my professional career.

A slightly different answer, because I'm sure there were others like me:

I learned to code in BASIC when I was 11. It must have been from a manual, because there wasn't anything else. I built a bunch of things, the last of which - and the only one I remember with any clarity - was a type of solver for a number game. I don't remember which, just that it was one where solving without software was much harder.

And I stopped. Because I felt stupid. It was hard, and when you got stuck there wasn't somewhere you could just go for answers. You had to figure it out. And neither of my parents coded, so they couldn't tell me that my running into these problems isn't a sign of being stupid or incompetent.

I kept telling myself I was rubbish, and so I stopped. Hardly anyone coded in those days, so what did it matter anyways? But it ended up mattering a whole lot. This was the seed from where other decisions stemmed. I'm not one to regret, but I feel really sad for this girl who learned to believe the wrong thing.

It took me a long time to undo the damage of this early thinking. I don't think I've ever completely reversed it, and I say this as someone who does actively code. I'm glad kids these days start with sandboxed environments, and gradually progress.

Recently, someone I know asked me for some recommendations for his kid (aged 10) to start learning Python. I gave him whatever tips I have, but man, I'm not rushing to get my kids into a proper coding language just yet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard].

I’d wanted to design interactive interfaces since before I even knew what those were. HyperCard, although it’s mostly forgotten today, was nothing short of revolutionary if you wanted to experiment with GUIs in the early 90s and you weren’t already a software engineer.

That’s also what got me interested in automation and personal information management.

I think I was around 10 years old when I noticed an old x86 (not a 286 -- my god I remember the excitement when that beast first came out) was lying around.

I somehow just liked it. It had MS-DOS. So I learned that. I'm not sure if it had Basic. But it had a manual, and the manual talked about x86 assembly language, and gave examples of how to write programs using the debug command from the command line.

I was hooked. For a while. It was so interesting. I learned about interrupts and how to get the computer to do things. At that age, all I wanted to do was draw pretty colors and lines on the screen -- most of the examples (if I recall correctly) were for "business" apps, like accounting, or database entry.

So I have the hardcore story that I started with assembly at age 10! Haha. But when a 286 arrived, with QBasic on it, I got a book, "Idiots Guide To QBasic" -- that had the same color scheme aesthetic as a Yellowpages, and learned how to draw pretty colors and lines. It was pretty fun. I remember the first modems too, the sound they made, and when 56K was a big thing. I think there was a 14.4K at some point too :)

What motivated me to contine? I don't know--it was just interesting. I just found it fun. Making stuff. Come alive. On the screen. It was pretty fucking cool

Cliche and boring, but video games.

My first foray into anything tangentially related to programming. Was figuring what the cryptic text files left on my desktop by RuneScape were (JVM stack dumps)

The next few years I really wanted to learn to make games. Interestingly, I never made any games, not really learned the programming languages I set out to, but I did learn the basics of programming, along with a ton of topical knowledge that has managed to be useless, but fun for talking about.

I started quite young, around 7 or 8. Obviously nothing advanced or anything, just very simple visual basic, and messing around with some chips and a few LED's. Got into web design/development in my early teens, did a bunch of app development, bit of backend, now mostly frontend & design of web apps.

To me code is magical; Even the small things like seeing a button click change something, or even seeing LED's light up in the way you programmed them, it's magic!

What motivated me is to build things. Quite uniquely to code is that you can build amazing products with very limited resources, the possibilities are endless. If you have a computer you can build. I always wanted to build stuff.

Now at 29 it is still what motivates me, I still enjoy building things, seeing something come to life that I designed and built still gives me so much fulfilment and joy. Seeing (quite a few) people actually use the things I build and getting value out of them is even better.

I also do a lot of product management type work atm, but the times I actually get to design & build stuff I realize how much I enjoy creating things. Code is such a great tool.

I also still appreciate the magic of code, now mostly in animations, transitions and well designed and programmed apps and interactions.

This is almost me, without the LEDs and the management type work.

Since the computer was already there, building things on the computer did not require buying more things, and I could see the result immediately.

I would not say magic.

I couldn't not.. I had a fundamental desire to know how to make programs for the computer, it seemed like deep magic to child-me that there were these "things" that could exist in the computer, these worlds.. that were made of "something" and I wanted to know what this something was, the matter that comprised programs..

It took me a while to figure it out, pre-internet days.. I understood that there was BASIC, on the C64, but I saw many programs there which would LIST just as a SYS statement, and some number, and I could understand that that number was not the entire program, and so that there was something hidden "beneath". The machine-code..

So, maybe I was not motivated at all.. There were no external factors, it was and still is, an intrinsic need in me, to understand this stuff, and the world in general, though I fell into the computing rabbit-hole a long time ago, and have only reasonably common knowledge about the rest of the world.

I learned to "code" at 9. The reason was we had an apple ][e with only a couple games and some BASIC programming manuals. If you wanted to do much interesting with it, the only option was to code something up. My (younger) brother and I used to write password protected "secret files" programs, and try to obfuscate the code listing so you couldn't find the password. Really simple stuff. One day I remember my dad (who is a tradesman that knows nothing about computers) helped me write code to plot a circle by solving the pythagorean formula for y=sqrt(h^2 - x^2) - neither of us knew sin/cos but he'd heard of pythagoras. (We were disappointed about the uneven spacing of points, I remember how game changing it was to learn trig years later)

This was in the late 80s. I think there was more incentive to learn to code back then because it was the only way to do anything fun. Now it's a much tougher sell

As a kid I used to get a kick out of reading manuals, I particularly remember those for SimLife and SimEarth. Somehow I got my hands on the manual for PC Tools for Windows, and I got really interested in the section documenting the scripting language. I think that was the first time I had the idea that I could make the computer do new things. I wore that book out carrying it to school to read at recess, thinking about what little utilities I'd make.

What's weird is we had computers at my school, and we'd done some assignments in Logo, but it never really clicked for me that this could be used for something creative. I was the kid the teachers would send for to fix their computers, but for a long time software was a mysterious thing I couldn't imagine making myself.

When I was 12 it was Counter Strike & World of Warcraft.

Nobody knew how to install weapon skins, sprays, or custom maps, so I learned how to do that & taught people in my clan how.

Nobody knew how to organize 40 player raids, so I learned how to host a forum & build a guild website for recruiting new players.

Eventually, I learned the power of automation and setting up bots to do the repetitive tasks on WoW like grinding honor and mining ore to make a little bit of money to pay for the subscriptions & computer parts.

It got to a point where I could level & gear a character up while I was at school and then do the fun PvP (player vs. player) arenas to get a special "Gladiator" title & sell the account on ebay for a pretty penny because it gave people a faster mount. Good times.

Grew up in the 80s just as home and office desktop computers were becoming available. I really only wanted to make video games like the ones in the arcades. I bugged my parents until I got an 8-bit Atari 400, and I self-taught BASIC, machine/assembly and all the hardware/ROM capabilities. The most I learned was probably by disassembling retail games. I once tried to make a multitasking system by context switching in interrupt routines but I didn't really understand all the details to make it work for more than a brief moment. From there, learning dBase II and III got me summer jobs and doing C later on co-op programme terms fit right in.

In 2001 I was in the 3rd grade and neopets.com was the website everyone spent time on in the computer lab. I wanted to learn how to build a website and with some googling learned about Apache, PHP and MySQL. Shortly after I was trying to figure out why performance was bad. This is when I learned about the request-response loop, background task queues etc. I kind of grew out of PHP (it was missing some of the concepts found in other mature languages) and switched to Java. Looking back I’m happy to see PHP has matured as a language and ecosystem.

Logo turtle in primary school was fun. I could draw with it better than by hand. What motivated me was that I wanted to be better than everyone else in class. Touch typing, first to finish assignments.

From first grade of highschool we learned python. Python was amazing, helped me do math and physics homeworks. I used it for everything I now use wolfram alpha for.

I’m really blessed to have had it all served on a plate. Great school system FTW.

I dabbled a little before, but I often wonder if I am ruined forever by picking up Beginning Perl at 12 because it was the only programming book I could find at my local library.

I wanted to know more about my computer. Learning to program seemed like the next step. I'm a sysadmin now. Knowing the basics of how programs are written really comes in handy when they misbehave.

I bought a copy of SimAnt and caught my sisters playing it. I didn't think it was fair that I had paid for it but they were playing for free so one of my dad's friends showed me how to rename the main executable and put a .bat file in that would check that the first argument matched an expected value (to "password protect" it)

Because back on the Apple ][, there was nothing going on when you booted it up aside from the OS. Sure, there was a program I could load called dbase which seemed boring, so instead I learned to code so I had something to do while puttering around my Dad's office on Saturday mornings.

I wanted to create video games.

I was already interested in electronics when my high school got PET computers at the end of my junior year. I stayed after school to get to use them. How could you not want to learn to use this new powerful tool?

I wanted to rip books from my high school's online book service so I could read them offline. I was 15 when I started programming in JavaScript, decided I didn't like it, and moved over to Python.

Some people on Animal Cross for the Nintendo DS were able to mod their towns like crazy, then some people had cheats and kept them to themselves, I was determined to figure out how they did it.

I wanted to make more complicated Bukkit plugins for a Minecraft server I administered. Thus began a dive into Java, then Javascript, Python, Elixir, and now Solidity.

Yes, my parents put me in some basic courses around the age of 7. Booting off 5.25 floppies and typing of commands on a green screen, I can still remember it.

video games

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