@nixCraft 1997 (i was 13), an uncle gave me a booklet with pascal and Qbasic program examples. I would write them in my PC and tinker with them to figure out how they worked.
@nixCraft 8 years old in BASIC on a ZX-81, 9 years old in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum. I programmed graphics in DR LOGO and databases in Mallard BASIC on a PCW8256, and a BASIC sector-by-sector copy tool for MSX at 13. I dabbled with C and Pascal on a PC1512 at 14, including some 8086 assembly.
@nixCraft The first formal course I had was in Pascal when I was 21 as part of the Electronics Engineering curriculum, but that also included 8086 and i386 assembly, but I was running those on emulation on a Mac… where I also had Turbo Pascal 2.0 for Mac! I used C++ for my master’s thesis on wavelet based image compression. And my first paid SWE work was on C and assembly for the Motorola Dragonball processors on PalmOS when I was 29.
@nixCraft Since then, I’ve mostly transitioned to Python, but I’ve been learning Objective-C, Smalltalk, Swift, and have quite some familiarity with packages like Matlab and it’s DSP libraries, Scilab, IDL/GDL…
@nixCraft 1991, Atari 1040STe BASIC, I played with making geometric art, later I scores a Toshiba portable 286 with a neon orange screen 🧡
It came with Borland Turbo Pascal and Assembler and my attempted side scroll shooter game kept me in the basement all summer.
@nixCraft I guess it would be around 15-16, C-64 BASIC. Those programs typed out of the magazines always had some typo so learning to program was a necessity.
@nixCraft I’d say 7 or 8, it was PowerBASIC and my father teached me. I also played around with VBA within Excel and shortly after Visual Basic 6. Good times.
@nixCraft 14/15 I started coding personal web projects in HTML4.1, CSS1/2, and a sprinkle of JS and CGI scripting. 16/17 did volunteer work, including PHP and SQL. By 17/18, started getting paid work and freelance.
@nixCraft I made a very simple file manager with Visual Basic on the school computers when I was about 16. Been playing with code on-and-off ever since but never considered myself good enough to be a "programmer", because they make actual cool stuff and all I was doing is linking systems together.
Now I'm in my late-30s and finally letting myself believe that I might actually be okay at it. #ImposterSyndrome#programming
@nixCraft The first code I wrote was in 1968 at school, I was about 21. The first code I wrote as a job was about 1973 when I was about 26. It was assembly language on a PDP8.
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