How did you end up as a programmer?

[Tournk]

Share your first experience of learning to write up codes. What language did you first try to learn, was it frustrating or fun?

[Babar]

At age 11, I tried writing BASIC code I found in a book directly into the DOS prompt. It didn't work, and I was sad.

[miguel]

Code: ags

REM Age 10, ZX Spectrum BASIC
REM I had a learning book in English that made things even more complicated
REM But it was fun to write simple things like asking name and age (INPUT) and then print it on screen.
REM I tried several times to convert rpg fiction books into programs but never finished anything;
REM Sometimes I miss typing GOTO 200...

[Cassiebsg]

Yeah, I was about the same age as both babar and miguel, and BASIC was also my "choice" with a ZX Spectrum.
I don't remember having any books about it though. My dad had brought some print outs of code to some games, and I sat writing the lines one after the other... I managed to get 2 games working, one was to drive a car on a road and avoid obstacles (view from above, and car could move from right-left-right. With what I learned from that, I remember modifying the game and doing some other stuff.

I later got an opportunity to learn a programing language and I took it, but turned to be off little use (to making games, anyway). Was a language for making databases (COBOL). I still had a lot of fun with it and got a pretty good grade at it (96 or 97%). But I haven't used it since, and at a little over 20 years, I would seriously need to re-read everything, since I can't remember much.

So I had a lot of fun, and maybe that's what I should have chosen for a career instead... my plan was always "I'll take this course now, and when I'm done in 5 years, I'll go and get an IT degree." But that never happened, took me 10 years to get my degree and then I had no more patience to go and spend another 5 years getting a new degree... (maybe I should have,considering how much fun I'm having with AGS scripting though :/ ).

I don't consider myself as a "programmer" though... (at least, not yet).

[Gurok]

I think BASIC's going to feature pretty prominently in the answers here. I started with TRS-BASIC on a Tandy TRS-80 Model III. I was mucking around with it at age 4 then about a year later, I was programming. I was in love with the idea of modular programming. I would write games that spanned multiple diskettes just so my game could say "insert disk 2". I thought it was all very professional. Looking back, programming was like playing a game. I think I was about 7 or 8 when I finally got an HGA. Still a floppy system, but I had MS-DOS 2.1. From there, I moved up through the MS BASICs (GW-BASIC->QBASIC->VisualBASIC) and finally studied C/C++/Java at university. Now I do web/UI work in JS all day :/.

[Cassiebsg]

Wow Gurok, that's pretty early to start coding!
Maybe I should get my 2,5 year old a computer so he can also start on it (and stop using half of my screen!)?

[monkey424]

My 14 month old girl is nearly walking and I expect will be programming too soon after.

My earliest programming experience was in the swinging 90's using GW-BASIC. (Surprise!) I blogged about this in an earlier post - rehashed here. LogoWriter was another program I recall using around this time - you know, the one with the turtle graphic?

AGS was probably my introduction to a C based language.

At Uni I studied a bit of computer science out of interest (but didn't follow that bunny too far down the rabbit hole). We covered C++, Haskell (I vaguely remembered the language sounded like Hucknell, as in Mick Hucknell from Simply Red), FORTRAN, MATLAB, and shell scripting.

Later, while job searching, I decided to teach myself some programming in MS Excel Visual Basic as I noticed a few jobs listed this as a desirable skill. I made a Sudoku solver and was quite proud of that.

My current job as a geotechnical engineer doesn't involve much programming but it will always be a hobby.

[Mouth for war]

I made my first game in qbasic. A text adventure featuring ascii code graphics. I wish i still had that game

[Snarky]

MSX-Basic on an MSX2 home computer connected to the TV. I must have been 8 or 9 or so.

Great machine (it was the original platform for the first Metal Gear). Everything built into the keyboard, and the default shell was a Basic prompt. You could literally just turn it on and start typing in your program. I eventually wrote a very basic text adventure/choose your own adventure/RPG for it, hardcoding every room and with random dice rolls for battle.

[Monsieur OUXX]

I think BASIC's going to feature pretty prominently in the answers here.

Yep. My experience is a weird mix of strong emotional and artistic shocks, interleaved with Basic

When I was a kid there were those Amstrad ads on TV, along with Sega ads, but it didn't make much sense to me: it was all for fun and games, and it was all the same : "TV" video games. To me it was like toys. We never had one at home, to date.

But then one day I was at the house of one of my dad's friends, and I was bored so he loaded Cryo's Dune and said "OK have fun I'll be downstairs if you have a question". HALLELUIA! I was totally blown away by this.

At the time my parents had bought a home computer (a DOS-based 286 PC), and I was playing Gorilla and Nibbles on it, which were shipped as sample programs for QBASIC. I didn't really understand why one had to first go through those screens of yellow text on dark blue background in order to play, but the fact that these were games was an incentive to bother figuring it out.

Finally, the older brother of my neighbour and best friend started programming stuff on his computer. It were really crappy programs, like Tetris clones and stuff (even a poor Yie Ar Kung Fu clone, lol). They were terrible. But it was like magic to me.


And one day,
One day!
Blessed be that day:

I was at my city's public library. And I was waiting for something (can't remember what). And I was bored. And I came across this childrens' book: "Basic with dinosaurs". It was a very simple book to teach kids Basic. With very naive drawings of colourful dinosaurs. Really, really silly. No more than 2 sentences per page, no more than 20 pages. I was way too old for that. It looked as childish as a "little miss" book. But I started reading because, as I've said, I had already seen Basic before, and I was curious of all that programming wizardry.

And it suddenly started all making sense. Like in The Matrix: abstract figures and symbols turn into reality. That stupid book made me so curious, I borrowed it from the library. I started coding stupid things like crazy : multiple-choices text-based adventures (with billions of GOTO). Then a few months later, graphic things. Along the years, it became more and more complex, and I discovered many concepts by myself, with no external help: Geometric shapes and vectorial drawing. Sprites loading. Compression. Etc.

It's only years later, only after graduating, that I decided to study computer engineering.
If it weren't for Dune, for my neighbour, and for that crazy book that I could never find again anywhere afterwards, my life would have been SO different.

[Khris]

It was Amiga BASIC for me when I was 11 or 12. My Dad had bought a Fischertechnik set (like Lego Technic) that had a serial interface to control motors and read sensors from BASIC programs.
After that I wrote tons of half-finished stupid "games" in AMOS Pro.

[Stupot]

I used to copy the BASIC 'type-ins' from Amstrad Action on my cpc464 when I was as young as maybe 9 or 10. I remember coding Snake and Solitaire and loads of stuff. I used to love that I could tweak a number here or there and it would change a color or a line, making it my 'own' version. But I never really progressed beyond copying and tweaking, and unfortunately I've never properly learned to code since :-/

[Crimson Wizard]

BASIC on ZX Spectrum (aka Sinclair), then QBasic under MS DOS, then began to self teaching myself C++ using books borrowed from my friend (this reminds me, I never actually returned them back, lol).

The best thing I did in QBasic was a turn-based RPG with pseudo-first person view drawn using Line and FloodFill functions . It was reading map from the text files. Combat took place on its own screen where player selected its target in the text menu.

This also reminds me, at that time I almost "invented" a concept of "pointer" (later learned for C++). I clearly remember having a situation where I wanted to have a variable which could "switch" between several other variables. Maybe Basic could do that? I couldn't find out how, and I have no idea even today .

[Monsieur OUXX]

Maybe Basic could do that? I couldn't find out how, and I have no idea even today .

I believe you could do that witht he PEEK and POKE instructions, that were never explained in beginners and intermediate books, or terribly explained, as if the authors wanted to hide the concept of pointers.

[AnasAbdin]

I was 5 when I copied some code from a book into a bit90 computer connected to the TV. All I knew back then was how to type the characters... I tried changing the numbers in the code, I saw errors and/or different results. At 7, I played with BASIC on an MSX.

[Retro Wolf]

I've mentioned this before; at school they taught us Visual Basic. Rather than do the work I was supposed to do, I'd make simple games and basic simulations.

[Billbis]

So I'll be the first newbie here that haven't ever written a single line of BASIC stuff.
I'll learn the basics of programming with Scilab (a free Matlab clone) as undergraduate some years ago. Then I started at the same time AGS and the wonderful, magical, superb, statistical-oriented R. Now I'm learning Java for some reasons, and seriously:
Why other programming language since R exists?

[DoorKnobHandle]

I started out at the age of 12 with a weekend course where a friendly and incredibly funny (usually not on purpose) Indian guy taught us C. Then my parents gave me some books on birthdays, game programming for kids, one was for C++ (Windows), one for Pascal (DOS). I started making Windows games with the Borland CBuilder IDE, mostly clicking windows together and drawing simple sprites. Then I got into the Genesis3D engine which came with GTest, a pretty cool 3D FPS multiplayer deathmatch game that I started to modify, slowly learning more about C++. At that point, I got Half-Life and started playing Counter-Strike (age 13 I believe) and started making maps for it with my friends using the wonderful Hammer editor. Then I found out you could make mods for the engine as well so I tried my luck at that, oftentimes in teams with random people that I found in the online community. The complexity of that engine, however, overwhelmed me and then I found AGS!

Only two years ago, when I started studying computer science, did I pick up Java, Python, Lua, Javascript, PHP and C# for courses that required them.

[Radiant]

I started in GW BASIC (and later QuickBasic) making some simple platform games. I sold my first game over the BBS network. It didn't do particularly well, of course, but it was a great overcomplicated puzzle that me and my best friend spent ages writing levels for. Then years later, me and a group of fans got into personal contact with Richard Pini (yes, that Richard Pini) and we endeavoured making a game for them. That didn't work out either, but it did encourage me to study Computer Science and get the necessary background in programming frameworks. After briefly working in Visual Basic, I permanently moved to C++ (for which I eventually created my own graphical library written in assembly language) and Visual C++, of which the AGS language is a close cousin. With that under my belt, I finally managed to successfully launch a fully designed game, which was SubTerra; it was moderately successful and enough of a cult classic to show up at HOTU and similar spots.

[EliasFrost]

I started when I was 13 I think, my dad got me an introductory video series on C, but I didn't get half of it so I stopped. Then when I was around 15 or so I stumbled across BASIC (darkbasic to be exact) and made a few small games, nothing major though but I learned a bit about programming. Then I bought a book about C++ when I turned 16/17 but still, didn't get half of it. And now 5, 6 years later I tried AGS and it's the only time that I feel like I've gotten the hang of stuff, mainly due to the great support of the members here on the board. I also bought myself a few newer C++ books around a year ago, so right now I'm reading and doing a bit of studying on my own on the side of my project, works pretty well so far.