23. I had recently graduated from engineering school and realized that I don't know how to program (despite good grades). I also had the regret of not having any side project.
So I decided to spend a few hours a day practicing; it's been almost two years, I haven't stopped since.
I remember being about 10 or 11 ('82/'83) and one of my friends had a C64. I used to go over to his house and play games on a green fluorescent display. He also showed me how he could make the computer output my name over and over again. I was mesmerized.
From then on I kept nagging my parents to buy one for me too.
When I was about 13 my father finally got a computer, through work. It wasn't a C64 like my friend had. It was an Olivetti XT x86 running at 8Mhz (most XT's at the time ran at 4.77Mhz). A massive gray box.
Over the next few years I learned BASIC then x86 assembly. By the early '90 the European Demo scene was in full swing. Good memories.
I'm amazed by the amount of people starting before 12. I started at 13, I was looking at random YouTube videos, and ran across a video entitled something along the lines of "How to make a web browser in VB." I then began to look at more of these videos until I could make a calculator, web browser, and progress bar. Then I left programming for a year. :( After a year, i picked it back up with a tip from a friend to not use VB, but instead use C#. After that I started to build stuff on my own and wrote a game in C#. After that I picked up a book called C++ Primer Plus from a local book store (I was 15 by this time), and read through it in about a month. Now, 2 years later I am working on a start-up using mainly C++ with bits of several other languages with the friend that tipped me off to C#. Cheers to you friend.
It also interests me that so many people started with HTML. I never really "learned" HTML, nor was it the first language I used. I just had to use it once to build a website, and it came extremely naturally after a bit of Google searching for tags.
As a sophomore in high school (1971), I had the good fortune to take part in an NSF-sponsored seminar that taught BASIC and the elements of numerical analysis. Afterwards, not having computer access, I started up a notebook that I wrote BASIC programs in. I wish I still had it.
About the same year, although I was 9 at the time. I discovered that there was no requirement to have an account to submit a job to the High Speed Job Stream in UofT’s Sanford Fleming building. You just typed your program up on punch cards, prepended the deck with a special card that instructed the system whether to use WATFOR, SNOBOL, or LISP (I did not try PL/I), and put it in the hopper behind everyone else’s job. Moments later, the line printer a few feet away would spew your output at high speed.
My math teacher in the 8th grade in 1971 made up a virtual machine with an assembly-like instruction set. He had us write programs and then 'execute' them by thinking about them as though we were the VM. Once we got the hang of that, we learned Fortran and got to send punched card jobs to a computer on the other side of town. Turnaround time
was measured in days. It's been a wild ride since then.
I hadn't mastered the concept of breaking out of the program so I reset the computer. And then stupidly entered the same program again to make sure it, you know, wasn't a bug or something.
My parents got me a Timex Sinclair 1000 when I was 10 or so, and I started programming out of the need for having something I could do with it. It became a Commodore 64 a couple of years later and that changed pretty much the rest of my life.
22. I had first done a very small amount of FORTRAN programming when I was 16, which made me decide I never wanted to program ever again. Then at the age of 22 I found Lisp :)
I learn programming since 15, but i realy do programming during my free time recently when i'm an undergrad student. I'm a i spent my time observating animal; measuring plant, trees, and microclimate; analyzing gene expression or culturing microbe on college. There's no need to do programming seriously, so i write code just for fun, solving project euler or other problemset.
Almost every hacker I know started between the ages of 11 and 14. That seems to be the sweet spot; the time when brains are malleable enough to be able to adapt to strange new concepts but have enough knowledge to be able to put those concepts in some context.
I think that compsci programs should be like art schools where your portfolio is what's considered first when you apply for admission.
I was born in 1983 and was fortunate enough that my parents got our first computer at 1987 (I always had a computer since then and probably started programming in my early teens).
However there are plenty of people who are far less fortunate and were not exposed to programming until much later in life (I know quite a few good programmers like that), is it fair to disallow them of a CS education at the because they don't have a portfolio at the age of 18?
Also like art, it should be a subject in schools. It can replace the pointless "how to use microsoft office" classes we're wasting kids' time with now.
Yes, I think that at some point in the future (one we are hopefully quickly approaching) basic programming knowledge would be treated like arithmetic & literacy and be taught to every school kid.
But we aren't there yet, and there are plenty of kids (especially in poor countries) which simply don't have access to a computer and/or someone to give them that first nudge to start programming.
When I was 15, I had to get a TI-83 for school. There was a fairly lively program trading scene, so I got a handful from friends. The 'EDIT' menu proved too tempting for me to resist and, TI-BASIC being what it is, everything went downhill from there.
Now, I don't think I could write anything in TI-BASIC to save my life. Thank goodness.
I think that the TI-83 is basically the perfect programming environment for novice programmers. All of the functions and language constructs are tokens accessible only through menus. They're all listed in menus, and it's very easy to wonder what the "For" statement does, for example, after you scroll past it for the hundredth time.
If you give a 12-year-old a Python repl, then they'll be paralyzed. There's just too much freedom. In years of tinkering as a child (in between booting and launching WIN) the only things I ever figured out how to do in DOS were press the enter key to make lots of C:\ prompts appear, and type things to get a "Bad command or filename" error. Compare that to the TI-83, where I was able to figure stuff out with minimal introduction.
Another aspect that shouldn't be discounted is that students can practice programming during math classes...
Yes, I think that this an important point. I learned programming with QBASIC which had a manual included. I learned a lot just by trying to figure out all these commands.
Another thing that may greatly help is auto-completion. Type some random stuff and look what the IDE thinks it is.
Had to wait until after the Vietnam thing plus 8 years as an art major. When I walked across campus and sat down in the keypunch room I very shortly began to spend all of my time there. This was before you could have a machine at home so I'll count the non-class time as 'free' :)
At the age of 8, I was enlisted in a programming school (thanks mom!), learning how to move the LOGO turtle around the screen. At the age of 12, I was programming a game while my colleagues were moving turtles around :)
started at about 12 by participating in a Logo "course" in a monthly youth magazine. I don't think I thought about it as "programming" back then, it was more or less in the same category as solving math puzzles and stuff.
Cool! We have a professor at my university who leads a project where students go to schools and teach the kids logo. (I just started with them, and so far it's a lot of fun and also quite a challenge.)
May I ask, what sort of programs you wrote? Interactive stuff, drawings, calculations? And what kind of topics/challenges did you like most?
I started at 9 but I don't think you have much to be jealous about. I did it because it was fun and I probably had a bit of a head start in terms of debugging skills, but really I don't think the intellectual maturity of someone <= 13 is great enough to severely impact the trajectory of your programming skills and where you find yourself in terms of programming skills at the age of 20 or something.
What I know about software architecture and programming concepts now at the age of 20 entirely dwarfs the accumulated knowledge and skills I gained from 9 til 13. I just did not have the intellectual maturity to really understand in a conscious way concepts like closures, types (sums vs products, unions vs records), data structures, algorithm performance (other than a visceral understanding of what is faster), static vs instance functions/variables, manual memory management. And so much more.
I think my knowledge and skillset grows exponentially year over year, but in the beginning I did not have much to compound and not enough maturity to gather and own much knowledge and experience. Would I be roughly where I'm at now if I had started at 14 or 15? I've thought about this a lot and I don't know.
Other thoughts on this are appreciated.
To be clear, I don't for a second regret the time I spent early on learning how to program; it was so much fun and intellectually stimulating. I'm actually quite proud of how early I started.
Something I've noticed from some classmates who where early starters is that they're not "superstars" after all. Some start at the age of 10 with basic but somehow they get stuck or something. A friend of mine had programmed since he was 10 (we're about 21 here) and he had done demos, designed his own processor and he was simply that guy. I looked up to him and I could of course never reach his level of prowess... Until one day when he was going to write a small program in C but he couldn't figure out how to do a loop without a goto. That was a pretty real eye-opener I tell you.
Another classmate also started at around 10 but he's still harbouring opinions like "C++ is the best, the rest are bad".
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I thought I'd share this anyway. The point I think I'm wanting to make is that when you start doesn't really matter, it's all about what kind of person you are and how much effort you put out.
Of course the reason I feel jealous sometimes is the thought "what more could I have done if I started sooner?". This is a bad thought to have I think, but it's still there somewhere.
When you were 12 or younger how did you learn how to program? I was 16 when I started programming as a hobby and I had a programming class. I wish I started programming when I was 12.
I think I was 11 or so when I went to a summer camp with my new laptop (an old thing that I got for free on the fleamarket). The idea was to play games on it - unfortunately it hadn't any on it.
One of the parents there then remebered that there's often some sort of BASIC preinstalled on these DOS/Win3.11-machines which normally had some demo-code (including games).
It turned out that there was indeed one (Gorillas, an artillery/worms-like game), but got quickly boring. So he showed my friend and me some basic commands for QBASIC and the rest is history ;)
I have some fond memories of that (and subsequent) camps, like trying to figure out if RAND() would actually return 0 or only bigger numbers. So we just wrote a program that generated random numbers and would stop if it encoutered a zero. Then we let it run while we went hiking trough some mountains.
Another fun thing was to figure out new instructions. There was a manual, but we couldn't read it because it was in english. But it had a nice list of all the commands. So we took one that sounded cool and tried to figure out what it did.
After that, my friend got a laptop too and we would try to out-code the other. One time, we tried to implement an "operating system" (it consisted of a long and fancy start-up animation and a nice menu to launch other programs). Every time, one of us implemented a new feature into his "OS", he increased the version number, copied it on a floppy and went around screaming "Guys! Look! This the newest version of my OS!"
I was first introduced to computers at age 9 (I'm not that old, the internet had been around for a little bit) when my "girlfriend" got me to talk to her on a chat site over summer break.
I started getting more and more interested in the things I saw like the way the chat programs worked (they were java applets), exploring them as a user and mod and learning how to "hack" them. It wasn't long before this lead me to communities where I was also shown HTML and I started learning about it.
When I was 10-11, I got into modding boards like the InvisionFree ones, which taught me a lot more about HTML and exposed me to JavaScript as you only had limited access to them so that's how all the modding was done, and a lot of those communities intersected with ones about making your own forum systems and/or modifying forums you had more access to (like hosting your own phpBB or IPB forums) which got me interested in PHP and MySQL.
By that point I'd heard a lot about C, etc. too and I was a lot more curious about computers than I was my schoolwork so I'd spend as much time learning about everything I could as possible. I started migrating to more general programming and hacking oriented communities when I was 12 and would stay up literally all night most nights and make up the sleep on the weekends, and I haven't had a proper sleeping schedule since.
I started in the mmorpg server-emu "scene". Stuff like World of Warcraft servers, etc. At that point I knew just basic HTML before jumping in. There were some people offering to make login, registration scripts, etc. for server websites. Along with a handful of people throwing around python in IRC rooms, IRC bots, etc.
It was a pretty natural process, from looking at some of their scripts and wondering "wtf" all the way to downloading the mysterious PHP interpreter and asking for help on rather trivial problems.
When I got to high school the BASIC class disgusted me. The teacher had zero experience and no style. Every assignment or lesson was out of a book that must have been 10 years old.
Edit: I've never used any books. It's really amazing how much is out there with a single internet connection.
I think, in general, a book that old is a turn off to many (high school) students, especially those who might not have wanted to take the class in the first place.
There was a Dutch magazine called "Zo zit dat" or (roughly translated) "That's how". It always had a computer section of two pages which I was interested in every time, and some day it featured how to build your website (save as htm, type <html><head><body><img src=etc.). It also linked me to a website with more information, where I learned more basics.
Not much later I started experimenting with Javascript, which did not go too well because I didn't know of the existance of error messages (using IE6), had no experience of course, and there was nobody to guide me. I also hadn't discovered forums yet, and none of the classmates I had on MSN were into coding yet. But I learned it eventually :)
I started learning to program the day after we got our first computer. When we got it, there were only two things it could do:
- play games if you plugged the cartridge into the side. We had one cartridge "Popcorn", which occupied Christmas day.
- if you didn't plug a cartridge into the side it dropped you into a BASIC interpreter and sat there with a blinking cursor waiting for you to program it.
So on Boxing Day I started reading the BASIC manual and started learning to program. I still remember parts of that first program, a bingo number puller.
20 IF N=1 OR N=2 OR N=3 OR N=4 OR N=5 OR N=6 OR N=7 OR N=8 OR N=9 OR N=10 OR N=11 OR N=12 OR N=13 OR N=14 OR N=15 THEN PRINT "B"
So I decided to spend a few hours a day practicing; it's been almost two years, I haven't stopped since.