Hacker News Reader

Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who finds these "I've been programming since 6" posts silly? I mean, I used to mess up with computers since I was a child, but I wouldn't call that "programming". In fact if I'm completely honest, it wasn't until 5 years ago when I truly started to learn and grow as an engineer, more than the rest of my career combined.

Rather than focused on quantity let's focus on quality. 1 good year of experience is worth 10 bad ones.

View on HN

This might be particular to the age of the OP. I just turned 47, so I'm one year older than him.

In 1981 (so when I was 5) my parents bought me a Sinclair ZX81. It came with literally nothing except a BASIC interpreter in ROM and a manual. The manual explained how to program in BASIC and had a bunch of listings that you could type in for rudimentary games etc. So when we got our computers at that era all we could do is "program". Was it hardcore software engineering? No. Did we understand it at that age at any meaningful level? No. But it was programming, of a sort.

In the next few years I experimented more and more until I started to grasp higher level concepts.

My point is there was a particular window in time that met these criteria:

- affordable personal computer.

- no (or very few) games available, you had no choice but to write programs.

This was around 1980-1983. Before 1980 most people didn't have access to personal computers. After 1983 you could get computers that could easily read games from tapes or floppies.

So I guess there were a bunch of 5 year olds in that era who were almost forced to program.

As someone 4 years younger, I'd argue the 'good times' carried on until the early 90s, at least for a kid that didn't have any money to buy new games all the time. The games back then were all simple enough that a devoted kid with lots of free time would get bored/beat the game in a day or two, and then you have to find something else to do. Now, there are millions of free games on the internet, not counting pirate/emulation, and also plenty of other media content distractions.

I'd also say that era (88-92) was great for being able to pick up cheap used computers. Commodore 64s could be found at garage sales, and I was fortunate that my father would bring home old IBM PC XT/AT boxes from work that were destined for the dumpster.

Agree, I did program on the Commodore 64 and later Amiga extensively and I too couldn't afford many games. However I'm not sure if I was the typical kid -- in the late eighties and nineties many of my friends had consoles and I had no interest in them because I couldn't program them.

The one sentence that isn't meaningful to the text, and that's the one you wish to comment on?

I started programming a few years later, maybe at 8 or so, but I would absolutely call that programming. I still have the note pads somewhere. It's nothing to be ashamed of, it's a beginner's first steps on a computer that does not exist.

Wait. You started out by scribbling down programs on a notepad and no computer? That's both adorable and inspiring. Were you working with BASIC? I'm super curious what this was like for you.

I did this too! Not on a notepad, but on a Royal typewriter, age 10. My dad had a telecommunications consulting business, based on a remote Univac mainframe he rented time on. He'd bring his Texas Instruments Silent 700 printer-terminal home from work, and I'd sometimes get to play Adventure and what-not if he wasn't using it. I vividly remember typing my first BASIC program on the typewriter, one afternoon after school, and then waiting excitedly for him to get home so I could actually type the program into the terminal. (Pretty sure the program was: 10 PRINT "HELLO" / 20 GOTO 10.)

EDIT: This would have been ~1976.

I did that too. I thought it was common. I learned programming by reading my older sister's Computer Science manual from high school in preparation for me starting high school (2004, Romania).

All school work was on paper so it was a necessity.

But it was fun too. In pointless classes like French, there was nothing better to do. It was worthwhile to work on my personal programs on paper and type them out when I got home.

You had to think about the approach before starting to write it down. I would leave a lot of vertical space in case I needed to put something above. In some cases I would write the code afterwards, draw a rectangle around it, and point to where it needed to move. It was a bit messy sometimes.

I did that, too. Maybe age 6/7. Didn't get a computer myself until I was maybe 11. I learned from library books and ported and modified the tutorial programs for a class mates computer. Pen and paper, what else was there? It was fun and the logic of it was really interesting, but it didn't go very far with the information and equipment of the day (or following decades). What other people found weird was mostly that I wasn't interested in games which is apparently what home computers were for.

I often wonder what life would have been like if I had got some processor architecture manuals and microcontrollers early on. I've only specialized in embedded systems much later in life and spent my earlier life doing other, somewhat adjacent, things.

Adorable? Maybe. Probably also a little bit weird. But kids are like that, they can be a bit weird sometimes. Translating square paper pixel graphics to decimal numbers and writing them down is not everyone's idea of fun.

It was during the first home computer revolution. My library had books on the subject which were intriguing, including the legendary "BASIC Computer Games". Those were written for several different computers, which didn't matter since I didn't know anybody who had them. But soon several of my friends got C64s and we could rewrite them for those.

Which was fun. Maybe not a common pastime back then but not unheard of either. Kids love to experiment and this was just one way of doing that. But it was definitively programming. There's wasn't much else to do with a home computer apart from what few games you had access to.

This reminds me, there was magazines in the regular shops which contained source code listings of programs, including simple games with graphics declared as decimal constants. Before modems that was how many people got their software. Since you had to type them in by hand, it was very natural to make modifications.

> I mean, I used to mess up with computers since I was a child, but I wouldn't call that "programming".

Well, he does call programming whatever he did.

In '83 they have sold 5 million computers according to the wikipedia[1], I am sure tens of thousands of 6 year olds started programming on them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...

I've been coding for 42 years (since the age of 13), about 33 years as a professional developer. I do tend to downplay the stuff I did on my own for the first 9-10 years because a lot of my peers started then too, but the stuff since late '89/early '90 counts.

More relevant to the post, I have had some pain in the past, mostly neck/shoulder from the monitor not being high enough, but some finger pain too (tendinitis - even before mice use was prevalent), switching to a vertical mouse has helped to reduce it quite a bit. The mouse I use currently

https://www.logitech.com/en-ca/products/mice/lift-vertical-e...

I'm not sure why it would be silly. I started playing baseball when I was 6, and if I continued to this day I would say I've been playing for 38 years.

The post is about his environment and computing setup. It has nothing to do with programming. The title and first sentence only mention that he's been programming since he was 6 to give context for his long-term computing use and how his life and computing setup have evolved.

I was coding in Q-Basic when I was about 9 years old. It wasn't much more than colored text on the screen and some inputs for a text based choose your own adventure for a little while but I was doing it. I was also playing other Q-Basic games and then reading their code to learn how to do certain things, then tweaking certain aspects of the code to change things, like what was said in messages and the hud and how much the score went up, etc.

Likely the only reason it wasn't earlier is I didn't have access to a computer until then. My parents didn't buy one until around that age, and I was already bugging them about it because my friend had one and was showing me these cool Q-Basic games he found on Compuserve. I started programming almost immediately after we got a computer in the household.

Now granted 5 is pretty young, I didn't even really know how to read then. But I probably would have by 7 years old if there was a computer in the house at that point.

I was also making Hypercard programs on the school library Macintosh (the original Macintosh) around that time, mainly images I drew with clickable portions to navigate to new screens, like navigating a maze.

My more serious programming was when I got a TI-85 calculator in 7th grade, though, so when I was around 12 years old. I started making text-based games on there, then action based games like Breakout, and at that point I was using plenty of for and while loops and checking keyboard inputs and creating menus and slinging variables around and calling functions and everything else.

I've also spent breaks between classes in primary school, at age 6-7, by writing BASIC programs on graph paper. Within a year or 2 I've transitioned to writing in Forth for XZ Spectrum. I used a Roland DX 80 plotter to "print" my source code. I've even sold plotted images from AutoCAD 1.0 for DOS.

I've also learnt Z80 assembly at the same time, coz the "4th Forth by Fébert Csaba for ZX Spectrum" had built-in assembly too.

I've seen my father designing and building a ZX Spectrum clone from scratch. He did explain the process too, so I got to know how a CPU+ALU+RAM+BUS+IO made up a computer.

So I very much consider those years part of my programming career, because they were very much formative and it was a continuum as programming became my career.

Also, don't forget, that all this was cutting edge shit, because there wasn't anything better available for affordable prices for everyday ppl!

even access to the ZX Spectrum was only possible for me, because my father could bring it home from work for the weekends and I could use it a little bit after school, at the University he worked at. my classmates never even saw any kind of computer up close, other than LCD wrist watches...

Some people actually did program when children, as opposed to "messing around".

I'm sure there's a lot of ways to enjoy programming other than "grow as an engineer".

I'm 42 and started programming in BASIC at 9 thanks to a ZX Spectrum my father bring home one day. During a lot of years my programs were all absolute crap by any standards, but I really enjoyed programming little shenaningans and crappy games. I didn't grew up by any engineering measure, but enjoyed the ride a lot.

That's programming too, if you ask me.

I’ve been programming and reading programming-adjacent books since I was about six. It definitely has shaped my views about hyped technologies since I remember the same sort of rhetoric used to promote OOP and XML and Java as is being used today to promote Crypto, AI and Rust.

I don’t know if it’s made me a better programmer, but it’s made me realize the importance of focusing on fundamentals and learning the ephemeral stuff just in time.

Mmm. I've been programming since 11. When I built my first computer (back then), it was soldering components to a PCB, not plugging a thing-that-only-goes-in-one-way into slots/sockets #1, #2, #3 etc.

So I guess I've been programming for longer than him, despite starting several years later in life. What "programming" means has changed a lot over the years though, I'll say that much.

I don't think it's silly, I like to see "how" people work.

The author is not uninteresting. His experience is far greater than most. You should browse his blog and you'll find you'll learn plenty.

Not every post has to be about something extraordinary. We're all aging together. He wasn't boasting his programming experience onto the viewers.

Have you had the opportunity to compare two 20 years old developers one with 10 years of experience and another with 2?

Feels like weird gatekeeping. Doesn’t count as “quality” unless you’re doing it full time as a career?

I started programming in 3rd grade when a teacher kept me in during recess because I was being bullied, and was first paid for programming in 7th grade when I ported a program from BASIC to C and used the money to buy my first computer). Silly? Didn’t feel that way.

Except the article is about 40 years of typing/mouse injuries and how they dealt with them, rather than 40 years of quality engineering output.

It's an extremely small part of the post.

I mean, I also mostly “messed around” at that age and didn’t really consistently program so I probably wouldn’t say that either. But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Fabien Sanglard did.

I almost always see it as a red flag. When I hear someone irl say it I interpret it as a sort of clout hack.

"I've been programming since I was six years old so listen to me when I say we should use mongoDB".

It can be meaningful but it depends on how they've been using that time. If they stayed at one company working on one project on a specific feature for 40 years straight, they may be a world class grandmaster in a very specific area which is only relevant for like 5% of all projects but have narrow experience and be incapable of providing advice on most coding topics that affect 95% of projects.

There's also a critical difference in the causality flow. Time alone will teach nothing but cynicism. But a lot of things take a long time to learn. Age and time is not a useful predictor by itself, but it's often correlative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com