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The first code I ever wrote, I wrote in Second Life. The first interface I ever designed was for a HUD I built for the robot avatar I wanted to sell in Second

The first code I ever wrote, I wrote in Second Life. The first interface I ever designed was for a HUD I built for the robot avatar I wanted to sell in Second Life. The first time I ever heard the names Neal Stephenson or Charles Stross, it was in Second Life. The first time I ever paid my rent based on work I had done entirely for and by myself, it was from selling hundreds of robots in Second Life. I was 19. It was magic. There's a substantial part of what I am today that I could not have become without what I learned from Second Life. Yes, the developer tools are awful and the laggy experience can kill a lot of the fun. But fuck – I was selling killer robots to people and getting paid for it in what could become real money, somehow. Because that's how I wanted to use it. And it let me do all of that? Incredible.

fauldsh 14y ago
This is entirely similar to my experience. I played when I was around 18 and created a hacky fix for skirts (they were an object attached to your body and when you sat down they would flow downwards still), this netted me a few hundred £ and started an enthusiasm for programming which has yet to stop. I still believe a 3D environment is one of the greatest ways to start learning object-orientated programming (due to the visual and tangible representation of your classes).
kellishaver 14y ago
My first real experience with learning to program anything (other than tinkering with some BASIC as a young kid) was scripting objects in a MUD. This was, I guess, the mod-90's, text-only equivalent of SL. You could even attach HTML to them and view said HTML by tacking the object ID onto the MUD's web site address. That's how I built my first web site; editing some markup attached to an object on a MUD server, over a telnet connection. My next big step up was the mIRC scripting language. You could make GUIs!

fauldsh 14y ago

This is entirely similar to my experience. I played when I was around 18 and created a hacky fix for skirts (they were an object attached to your body and when you sat down they would flow downwards still), this netted me a few hundred £ and started an enthusiasm for programming which has yet to stop. I still believe a 3D environment is one of the greatest ways to start learning object-orientated programming (due to the visual and tangible representation of your classes).

kellishaver 14y ago

My first real experience with learning to program anything (other than tinkering with some BASIC as a young kid) was scripting objects in a MUD. This was, I guess, the mod-90's, text-only equivalent of SL. You could even attach HTML to them and view said HTML by tacking the object ID onto the MUD's web site address. That's how I built my first web site; editing some markup attached to an object on a MUD server, over a telnet connection. My next big step up was the mIRC scripting language. You could make GUIs!