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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

One of my parents was a programmer and yet nobody mentored me!

Which probably explains why my dad is a systems programmer writing drivers for Windows and I'm using Haskell on Linux to do programming language stuff with a healthy dose of PL theory. Hard to imagine any way to be so different while staying in the same field.

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Pretty much this. My old man was working with C and Assembly back in the day, I believe, and I'm an aspiring full-stack dev using Python/Ruby/JS mainly, so couldn't be more different!

For some reason when I was growing up, programming wasn't ever discussed as a thing I might want to do, so came to it myself much later on.

My Dad did not mentor me, but he did make sure my house was filled full of programmable things. We do completely different things in the tech world now, but the objects he provided in my environment certainly had a big impact (BBC micro)

My dad coded mainframe systems for IBM, but actively discouraged me in my teen years.

I did pair with a same aged friend. We co-learned BASIC and Z80 assembler at the age of 12.

My both mother and father developed software running on IBM mainframes for large USSR enterprises. It's interesting that USSR could not purchase mainframes legally so USSR worked around this restriction and finally was able to buy software with the help of KGB agents in Romania who introduced themselves to IBM sales as Romanian citizens. You can read more about it here [1] After crash of soviet economy my parents became unemployed and never worked as programmers again. My father teached me some C in TurboC IDE. Currently I am full stack web dev. [1] http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~magi/personal/humour/Computer_Folklor...

Did your dad discourage you from working with mainframes, or discourage you from programming in general?

Same here. I actually had some troubles growing up, because I was spending too much time on the computer (learning Pascal at that time) instead of doing schoolwork. Sigh.

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