Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How old were you when you wrote your first program?

4 pointscmstoken13 comments

What was your story like? How old were you, and did you ever think you'd end up where you are today when you look back at those times?

It would be really amazing to hear your stories!

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I was coding in Amstrad BASIC on a CPC 464. The program didn't work, because I didn't understand the difference between strings and numbers.

I wrote out my listing and took it to my teacher at school, to ask why my program didn't work.

This led to my first inkling that adults didn't have all the answers :)

My teacher had never used a computer before, didn't really understand the problem, and certainly couldn't solve it. To her immense credit she clearly explained all of those things at the time rather than bullshitting me, and suggested I try to find an adult with an interest in computers. Basically, she helped me develop me the skills to solve my problem.

Quite the formative experience, that was.

Quite old. I was in my mid 20s. But this was in the early 1970s.

It was a BASIC program. I was given about 20 80-column cards which I had mark with a thick black pen in the relevant positions. I then gave the pack back to the friend who had access to one of the early multi-user terminals in another town and who could run it. He was impressed that it ran perfectly without any syntax errors, but not that it was an infinite loop. <grin>

On the other hand, my first computer I had to build with a soldering-iron and a very large box of parts in 1979 and that's what finally enabled me to begin programming for real, in both BASIC and Assembly Language.

10 or 11, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BASIC. most likly i started by typing in the examples from the book, working from there. changing lines of code, see what it does to the program. some two years later i got a c64. the basic was a lot worse, but it was the machine i got around my head to assembler, or at least machine code - because i did'nt understand the concept of the assembler, but i very well understood the machine-code-monitor in the final cartridge.

but rasterbars, and softscrollers with (stolen) musik and sprites on the bottom/top border, was as far as i ever got.

My first program on record is dated June 25th 1976; I was twelve. You may see it on an emulator of the Mitra-15 LSE system I wrote recently at:

http://nasium-lse.ogamita.com:8117/

then type (C-s = control-s):

C-s CH C-s /BOURG C-s AP C-s BOUR C-s LI C-s 1 C-s EX C-s 1 C-s

(LSE = Langage Symbolique d'Enseignement, a French programming language used in the 70s and 80s in the French schools). http://nasium-lse.ogamita.com

At 8 or 9 I wrote in an Amstrad CPC 464 a program in Basic that was moving the letters of my dad's company. I remember that at the time, I understood the for/next loop, but didn't think about the nested loop, so I wrote lots of code that could have been a two or three liners. Something like:

    FOR I=1 TO 100
    PLOT I,1
    PLOT I,2
    ...
    PLOT I,50
    NEXT

Hey, another Amstrad user :) Do you still develop for the system (as a hobby, of course)? There's an active community. E.g. check out:

https://github.com/Octoate/cpc-sdcc-rom

Well, the Amstrad is now either at my parents' house either in the garbage :( so I can't use it sadly... It was in the late 80's that I was playing with it, I'd love to check it again though.

There are some good emulators out there; I use WinAPE ( http://www.winape.net/ ) under Wine, which works nicely on both Linux Mint or FreeBSD.

7-8 I supposed. My dad got us a commodore 64 and some book to write programs. Went through those programs to figure out how things worked. All I made was a text trivia game, was pretty lame. Then I didn't even have another computer until I was 24ish... now I'm in my late 30s and have started writing programs to automate my IT job.

Sometime around 7. At the public library, I found a book titled "How To Make Games." It went through the design and implementation of a text adventure game in BASIC, with a full program listing in the back. I discovered that our family computer had a copy of QBasic 1.0, and from there I was hooked.

Being a little kid, I never thought seriously about the future :)

10. It was a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game in Apple II Basic running on a Mac LC.

12. It was a console based tic-tac-toe game in C++

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