Ask HN: How many of you HNers learned to program for the first time in college?
What was the experience like good and bad both? What was your first language? Would you have changed something if you were given another chance at life?
I learned to program BASIC in 3rd grade and C in 7th grade. Then FORTRAN and PASCAL in college (Mechanical Engineering). Then C++, Lisp and C# at my first job. Then PHP and SQL, and later Python. Somewhere in there I learned assembler for x86 and some microcontrollers. I learned Java just so I could teach it as a volunteer APCS teacher.
Just start; that’s the key.
They enrolled a couple of hundred students but only had 5 card punch machines and one reader. One month of 24/7 programming by trial and error, which the lecturers wanted to avoid, only two machines survived, one had a broken ‘b’ key.
This set me up for future success as future 1980’s employers always got the young bloke to run the computer.