1) How did you learn to code? It started with a book named "Basic para niños" (BASIC for Kids,) which as you may guess, taught me some BASIC when I was 8 years

1) How did you learn to code? It started with a book named "Basic para niños" (BASIC for Kids,) which as you may guess, taught me some BASIC when I was 8 years old. Then a few years later I learnt some basic Pascal (I don't remember where from, it may have been a class in my school, when I was around 11 or 12.) Then I taught me some assembler from a book (around 15) and Visual Basic (and Visual Basic for Applications) around that time, too. I didn't learn anything new until 17 when I started with Lisp and a little later, Python. Then in my university I was taught C (which I complemented by reading TFM, i.e. the K&R book.) After that I've learnt on my own many more languages, up to a certain fluency. The list of things I can at least write a "hello world" (actually if I have learnt it I can write something larger once I get back into the language structure, because every language I learn is for "something") includes Basic, Pascal (well, actually I don't remember much about Pascal,) C, Lisp (that's Common Lisp mainly, and quite a lot of Emacs Lisp... I can write Scheme, but somehow I never got really into the deeper parts of it that make it "Scheme",) Prolog, Forth, Go, Javascript (that's for the browser and for node.js,) Awk, Bash (heh,) Java (ugh,), octave/Matlab, R, PHP and probably 1 or 2 more I'm forgetting right now. I'm currently writing quite a lot of Go, trying to find some use for J to learn it (it's fg crazy!) 2) When did you start learning (perhaps informative because of the recent rise of MOOCs)? When I was 7-8, that's (whoah) 23 years ago, in 1990-91, before I even had a computer at home. 3) At what point (if yet) did you start working as a programmer professionally relative to your initial efforts? I'm not sure when the correct timing is. When I was working as a researcher I wrote quite a lot of code as part of my work, and now even if I write a lot of code for work, my main work is not being a programmer. It took a long time, of course, because I started early and didn't start to do real work until right after college.