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Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

Related: are there any 2nd or 3rd generation programmers around? My both parents are professional software engineers.

(Waiting for someone to go: "I am a direct descendant of Ada Lovelace, now get off my lawn")

Im 25. I remember my dad mentioning writing software to compute the trajectory of artillery shells when he was a Navy cadet. He later went on to establish some of the early IT institutes the Navy uses to train it's personel (this was some time in the mid 90s).

I would hang out with my dad in his office, and that's when i first saw computers. Later on, i was exposed to Foxpro programs in high school and two semesters of C in freshman year. But i was too busy fooling around with my buddies to take notice. I was studying EE, so din't really get much programming practice except for some Matlab.

It was only toward my third year in college when i sensed that having good programming skills might be useful. That's when i started doing some project Euler problems. My final year project involved an embedded networked application, and that's when got to know about GCC, linux and the open source world.

I am now a programmer in a research lab, and my masters thesis involves building machine learning models for an underwater acoustic communication system.

2nd gen here.

My father was the "it guy" for a swiss engineering firm in sweden, lots of *nix and vms stuff.

had the vic 20, then c64, then amiga, then 386, 486 and onwards at home, I was probably 6-7 years old when I started playing. Like another poster higher up, had to learn binary pretty fast to make rasters and sprites etc. lots of fun over the years.

But, in reply to your question, yes, I am 2nd generation, something I actually liked to point out in interviews early in my career.

Probably would have been 3rd generation, had my father's father not died in the second world war. He was a physicist, which was pretty unique for a Welshman of very modest background at the time.

War - what a catastrophic waste of young minds and bodies.

On a positive note, my son, at 15 months, has already earned himself the nickname "Little Schemer"...

Third, although indirectly. I'm nearly 40. My grandfather was a chemist and used computers from the really early days. My mother studied physics but hates computers, but my stepfather is a mathematician who also used computers since the punch card days, so I at least have a representative in each generation!

My dad taught me programming in 1964, on IBM equipment where you used patch cables to write code. I was 10 at the time. Been programming ever since. I'm teaching my kids now - they are both using Scratch, which makes them 3rd generation.

2nd. I started learned BASIC at 5 by watching my dad program a VIC 20 and copying what he wrote on paper. When he noticed he sat me down in front of the computer and showed me enough to get started.

Third ?

I'm 40. My grandfather, when he was young, even if he did almost no programming, was a leader in the introduction of computing in press in US and later in France.

My mother's first job, when she was 18, in the late 1950s was punching paper tape for one of the early Manchester computers.

3rd gen, my family is full of programmers.

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