5 ms·
Poll: When did you start programming?
As a new decade dawns I thought it would be interesting to see when people of hn started programming.
- beej71 16y agoHmmm! 90s: 195, 00s: 157. Assuming that trend continues, I'd not speculate that there were more learners in the 90s; but where, if anywhere, are the learners from the 00s hanging out?
- _0ffh 16y agoHalf of generation nought need another five years time, I suppose. Alternatively, all the toddlers I've met yet have successfully hidden their 1337 h4xx0r1ng skills from me. Probably have a secret agenda, them darn toddlers. Holding back the singularity until we've died of old age, I bet.
- exDM69 16y agoI started hacking with QBasic before the age of 10, in the early 1990's.
- jdanylko 16y agoBeen programming for over 20 years professionally. I received my Commodore VIC-20 when I was 11 years old. :-D http://www.dcs-media.com/Archive/20-20-top-20-programming-lessons-ive-learned-in-20-years-FH http://www.dcs-media.com/Archive/20-20-top-20-programming-le...
- oceanician 16y agoProfessionally since late 90s, but since late 80s on Commodore 16 and Amstrad CPC. Then Qbasic on a PC. Good times.
- whatevers2009 16y ago90s
- Apreche 16y agoKindergarten, late '80s.
- ra 16y agoKindergarten, seriously? I started at 7, and I though that was on the early side.
- haploid 16y agoIt's possible. Kindergarten is age 5-6. I started with LOGO in the first grade( age 6 ), if that can be considered a programming language. I was poring over my dad's purple 8086 book by age 8 and writing some basic assembly programs. Kids' minds are incredibly plastic. One year difference, given the wide variability of interest and abilities in a given population pool, kindergarten is not difficult to believe.
- binarymax 16y agoLogo when I was 7, in the mid eighties.
- kolinko 16y agoamos when I was 10, then turbo pascal when i was 11 :)
- artmageddon 16y agoTechnically I was exposed to Logo as a kid, but we never kept the computer in our classroom for long. My first exposure to Visual Basic was in 1997 for one semester(freshman in high school), and started seriously programming in C++ in 1999(start of senior year). I do mostly .Net now.. I still feel like I have a long way to go. I never knew how to get developer tools and good documentation till my last year of school. I wish I knew sooner.
- flyosity 16y agoI don't know how this came about, but my elementary school had (the gifted kids) programming in LOGO in 2nd and 3rd grades. It was never explained as computer programming, more like a game to make a turtle draw cool things. I'd love to meet the school administrator who decided this was important and buy him or her a beer. It started my entire passion for computers and programming.
- Qz 16y agoIn BASIC (the horror) when I was maybe 6 or 7. I tried making text adventure games by writing out every if/then branch explicitly...
- vibragiel 16y agoBeen there. Ah, those infinitely nested INKEY$...
- steveklabnik 16y agoAre you me? I was lucky enough that my grandparents bought me one of those computers that hooked up to my TV, and it had a BASIC interpreter on it. I still have the manual...
- alok-g 16y agoI still have the computer too! (Sinclair ZX Spectrum+)
- thirdstation 16y agoWas it a Commodore 64? That's what I had. I attribute my code reading abilities to navigating my own GOTO spaghetti while trying to recreate ZORK.
- henry81 16y agoSame.. my dad had a big book on BASIC programming and we just got our first computer. I've been hooked ever since.
- silentbicycle 16y agoSame here, BASIC, 5 or 6. Text adventure games, lemonade stand, and so on. Dijkstra says, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." But he complained about nearly everything.
- Qz 16y ago
- mtm 16y ago1977, 6502 assembly language (hand assembled machine code really) on a KIM-1. 1k RAM, 6 digit 7 segment display and hex keypad. Still have that computer and it still works.
- corin_ 16y ago<pedantic> There shouldn't be an apostrophe between the number and the 's'. "Will learn in the 10s" should just be "10s", as some people may have already started programming in the past 12 months </pedantic>
- randallsquared 16y agoThe usual answer to the date controversy is that since there wasn't a year 0, each decade must be 1-10, so the 10s start in 2011. I'm comfortable with saying, instead, that the first decade had 9 years and the first century 99 years, and so on, but other people seem to object more. :)
- corin_ 16y agoPerhaps overly ironic given my pedantic tags before, but the year 0 issue is something where I see no point being technical. As far as the population of the world is concerned, 2000 was the start of the new millenium, etc. Either way: while you can claim that 2011 is the start of the next decade, 2010 is definitively the start of "the 10s". I was born in `90, I would listen to an argument that I was born in the same decade as someone who was born in `85, but to say I was born in the eighties would be undeniably incorrect.
- dtby 16y agoThat is ridiculous. You can say that the the second decade of the 21st Century started in 2011... but to pretend that the 201x decade started in 2011 is not even wrong.
- npaquin 16y ago80s - TI994A
- kungfooey 16y agoLike a few other posters here, I got my start in QBASIC (kids want instant visual feedback, and QBASIC certainly did that). Parents bought a computer, then forbid us to play anything resembling a game. So I wrote my own (and also discovered Gorillas). I think the first thing I built was a slot machine making use of random numbers.
- corp 16y agoIn the 90s with QBASIC ... then Turbo Pascal ... etc
- _0ffh 16y agoEarly 80's: C64 BASIC & 6502 ASM =)
- oozcitak 16y agoSame here. I vividly remember entering type-in MLX programs[1] to the C64. I later learned C64 BASIC. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ComputesGazetteProgramPage.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ComputesGazetteProgramPage...
- sudont 16y agoPicking up cocoa as my first language over the past few months. Been scripting with jQuery for a while.
- forgottenpaswrd 16y agoIt started as a game. We were reading about disassembling and competing was fun. Those were the days of +ORC reversing tutorials. I wanted to know how computers worked and discovering Linux was the next big step in that direction. Later C,C++, python, objective C..., I think understanding what the computer does with every line gives you an advantage. Some things become obvious to you but not to other programmers without hard assembly experience.
- ra 16y agoAll I wanted for my seventh birthday was a computer. My parents got me a second hand ZX81 which came with an excellent user manual [1] which was mainly a tutorial for programming in BASIC. [1] http://web.ukonline.co.uk/sinclair.zx81/ http://web.ukonline.co.uk/sinclair.zx81/
- damncabbage 16y ago'91, first with QBASIC, and then with GW-BASIC because I couldn't get QBASIC's editor to exit after running a script. :)
- djhworld 16y agoMy Dad got me a ahem pirated copy of visual basic 6 when I was about 14 in 00/01 While I'd hate to develop anything in VB these days, it did kick off my interest in software development. Especially when my friend was into it as well so we'd make stuff and share it with each other. Java developer by trade these days, and I use Ruby or Objective-C for personal development.
- petercooper 16y agoNot to pile on the guilt, but I swept yards when I was 11 to raise the money to buy Visual Basic for DOS 1.0 when it came out ;-) Unfortunately, the joke was entirely on me in the end!
- sjs 16y agoI also got VB4-6 pirated somewhere around 1998. My dad got me to read a book on VB4 and down the rabbit hole I went (I had dabbled before, but just scripting apps like mIRC and a few DOS batch files).
- dejv 16y agoI started with Commodore 64 using Basic in 1993, maybe 1994. Than I've got PC with QBasic, later Pascal, C++ and Delphi.
- iisbum 16y agoI started tinkering with programming in the 80s (Vic20, Commodore64, AtariST), but didn't get into it seriously or for work (Assembly, C, C++, Pascal, Java) until the early 90s.
- PigBoyOhBoy 16y ago1975 in BASIC on Dartmouth College's time sharing system. I was 13 at the time and the local schools had installed a handful of mechanical teletypes (chukka chukka chukka chukka ding chukka...). It was a beautiful thing!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- CodingGoat 16y ago... the zx-81 and basic was my first weapon .. 1982 or 1983
- igrekel 16y agoOn a vic 20 that we hooked up to the living room's tv, we got it when I was 7 ad played games on it. Then I started programming when I was 8. It had all sorts of characters like borders and symbols that made character (think ascii) graphics work not too bad. Peeking and poking memory was fun too.
- ptn 16y agoA poll on "how old were you when you started" would also be interesting.
- sjs 16y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048989 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048989
- shimonamit 16y agoI was 14 when I began tinkering with the BASIC code of the DOS 'Gorillas' and 'Nibbles' games. I loved changing the color schemes and making the bananas fly ridiculously fast.
- henry81 16y agoI liked making the bombs blow up ridiculously huge for the Gorillas game.
- zdw 16y agoMacPascal on a 512k Mac with 20MB of hard disk, probably around 1985-86. I didn't do anything useful with it, but that editor had the weirdest syntax highlighting ever - a mix of bold/italic/outline for symbols/variables/errors.
- scorchin 16y agoIt was the late 90's and I started learning PHP3 and HTML. Then soon enough I started reading about BASIC, C, Unix, Linux...
- briancurtin 16y agoIf I wasn't such a know-it-all kid, I could answer 90's (99). Instead, I told my dad Python is stupid and I don't want to be a programmer or study computer science. ...then I went on a few years later to study CS and now I use Python.
- wglb 16y agoEr, what about IN the 60s?? 1965 for me.
- xd 16y agoyeah, sorry about that, I should have proof read it. Also messed up on the apostrophes.
- emwa 16y ago00s. Unlike many posters here, I only started programming while at the university with c as my first language. I spend most of my time coding in python and javascript though.
- robterrell 16y ago1977: I learned BASIC from typing in programs in "What To Do After You Hit Return" and experimenting by changing things. On a Processor Technology SOL. My dad also had a BYTE-8 (I see that's not even in wikipedia, I think it was an IMSAI clone) and had to manually enter the machine code for the paper-tape loader via a set of paddle switches, one byte at a time (one switch per bit, plus a switch for "set"). Then he had to pull the paper tape through the reader at just the right speed, or he had to start over. Good times!
- pauljonas 16y agoOn a DEC VAX system in the early 1980s. FORTRAN was the 1st language I programmed in, then quickly followed by a more immersive bout of Pascal.
- csomar 16y agoI started in 2000 (at the age of 10) with my old father laptop (running Windows 3.1). I hit the Qbasic icon because I liked the hummer image and wanted to see what's inside. Really, nothing was interesting, but my father introduced me to few commands (print, if, then...). Few days later, I started reading the documentation in English, even though I didn't know English.
- delfin 16y ago80s DB2, BASIC for games into cassete tapes. ;)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hsmyers 16y ago1975 - Easytrieve on a 360...
- iterationx 16y agoTI 86 !
- jwdunne 16y agoNot long after the start of 2001 at around 10 in Visual Basic. Edit: Was LOGO the one with the turtle? I remember having fun with that in primary school.
- inetsee 16y agoYour poll is broken. I read my first programming book (a programmed instruction text on machine programming) in the mid-60s. This was neither before the 60s nor in the 70s.
- J3L2404 16y agoPrime number sieve on an HP-11C. Gotos and labels baby!
- gnosis 16y agoPrevious discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709074 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709074
- gherlein 16y agoI wrote my first code on a TRS-80 model 1 with level one basic and a cassette drive. Our high school math teacher got us permission to use the local University mainframe to learn fortran. That was in 9th grade in 1978. I was 14.
- MaysonL 16y agoBoolean algebra (does that count?) in '59-60, Fortran in '63-64 (on a NASA 709x).
- commandante 16y ago80's