How did you end up as a programmer?

Started by Tournk, Tue 01/07/2014 12:08:34

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Tournk

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

Now, with his very own game: Alien Time Zone

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...
Working on a RON game!!!!!

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).
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

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 :/.
[img]http://7d4iqnx.gif;rWRLUuw.gi

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!)?
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

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 :-D
mass genocide is the most exhausting activity one can engage in, next to soccer

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

Quote from: Gurok on Tue 01/07/2014 13:55:03
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

#12
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

Quote from: Crimson Wizard on Tue 01/07/2014 19:37:32
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?
:-D

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.

Intense Degree

Not that I'm much of a programmer, but my way in was similar to many people here, BASIC at around 8 or 9 years old on an Amstrad CPC 6128.

The system came with a huge book on BASIC which included a large glossary of keywords and examples, some lessons and quite a few sample programs you could type in yourself (mostly rubbish games) and play around with. Just thinking about it makes me want to go on ebay and track a copy down!

I can still remember how cool I thought it was to find and change the line "Lives = Lives - 1" in various games - NOW I AM INDESTRUCTIBLE! ;)

Other than that, the only things I have spent any serious time with are QBasic and AGS script, despite having dabbled but never really got into a few other things.

CaptainD

Not that I've ENDED UP as a programmer as such, because after a while dabbling in AGS I decided that I would never be more than a vaguely competent coder, so I get others to do the dirty work based on my designs... 8-0  BUT...

First attempts - ZX81 BASIC.  Pretty much just copying stuff out of books, running, hoping there wasn't a dot out of place or the dodgy power pack didn't fall off again.

Commodore 16 and Spectrum +2 - I experimented a little.  Mainly with kaleidoscope style graphics with the LINE command within nested FOR...NEXT loops.  You know what I'm talking about.

Atari ST - this is where my first serious attempts at programming lay.  The bundled ST BASIC was pretty poor, but I learnt a bit from using it.  Then I got STOS.  This was a major breakthrough (though due to its inherent design a little limited compared to the later Amiga version AMOS, which was much more along the lines of GFA BASIC, which I never really got on with).  I eventually made a couple of pretty decent games with STOS, but by that time the ST market had crashed and my dreams of becoming a 16-bit game programmer / designer came to nought.  Made lots of prototypes that never really got very far.  (Also tried and nearly - but not quite - succeeded in programming a bespoke stock management program - also in STOS.  Just couldn't quite get the hand of formatting the data arrays for printing well enough for some reason.)

PC - Dabbled with AGS (2.71 I think), did a bit, lost all my data when my computer died, didn't have enough interest to redo it all.  Later I learnt JustBasic (the freeware little brother of Liberty BASIC) and made a reasonable little text-only parody RPG and decent-ish Light Cycles game (always wanted to make one of those things!), but neither the language nor my own ability was going to be good enough to do anything really impressive.  My continuing love of adventure games eventually led me back to AGS, where after some more dabbling, I came to realise that I should stick to the bits of game creation that I could actually be good at - and programming was not one of these things.

So there you have it.  The story of my programming non-life!
 

Ponch

#22
Basic, thanks to RUN magazine. I am incredibly old! :P

C-64 machine, I should add.

Nikolas

My father had bought an HP old computer (the HP-150) back in 1983 (when I was around 6 years old), and since he couldn't find any software to actually use (I remember that that HP was particularly NOT compatible to anything out there...), so he was forced to learn programming (GW-Basic) and make stuff there.

Well... I followed lead and a few years later we got an Amsstrad 1512 which was, finally IBM compatible, so we could run games and the such.

I did start programming on my own around around the age of 10, even made a few games (one of which was nice enough I'd like to think), but that's about it.

I never picked up anything new about programming and never cared to do so. I'm too much of a musician I think.

Calin Leafshade

BASIC on a BBC Micro which were amazing.

I distinctly remember trying to make a quiz type program and not understanding why this wouldnt work:

Code: basic
IF $ANSWERGIVEN < $ANSWER THEN


The answers were things like capital cities.

Billbis

Code: C
if(Answer %in% CorrectAnswers) {
    ...
}

R beauty.
:=

faerieevenstar

#26
I don't call myself a programmer at all!! I'm an ARTIST and a game addict. The first programming I ever did was level skip cheat on my BBC Micro at about four or five, which was so easy. Find the line of code and edit it. I wanted to play all of Repton, but had no patience. I've never gained patience! I even learnt a bit of Basic on the PC (in fact I had to write a short program in basic to get my computing badge at Brownies! Hahah!) , but beyond spits and spots of HTML and LINUX stuff, I've not learnt any more. I can barely remember any of old programming anyway now :\

The biggest bit of coding I ever worked on was a joint project with my brother- we were writing Blue Meanie out line by line from BBC Micro User magazine. We NEVER finished it. Ever. We would also work on game where he did the code and I would make the sprites- that is where my love affair with drawing for games began :-[

Tournk

Quote from: Crimson Wizard on Tue 01/07/2014 19:37:32
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).

Really? :smiley:  What happened to that friend?


So, everyone here have started learning how to code really early. I'm jealous of that because at the age of 10 or 11 I didn't even dared to care about anything. I am ashamed.

For me though, I got into programming after looking in the internet for a free game engine last year. I found AGS and started to make some games. It was so hard at first. But after a few weeks reading the manual I finally understood a little bit of coding. I use simple codes only, mainly to make the character animate.

Then earlier this year I started liking the idea of coding games after getting inspired by some of the contents of the AGS forum. I started learning C++ from an e-book. And really, whoa! Now that's what int and string really mean! I was estatic when my codes worked in the AGS editor. I devoured much much info from the book until I got to the chapter of pointers. I was immidietly dumbfounded.. I quit learning and sometimes even have a look until I get a crazy headache.

I still do a bit programming, but only less complicated codes...  :sad:

Maybe I should learn C first?
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Radiant

Quote from: Jaineshon on Sat 05/07/2014 04:46:04
Maybe I should learn C first?
Not particularly, no. Thinking in object orientation is a good skill, and that works better with C++.

It's ok if you don't get pointers; it takes most people years to get pointers. They're not necessary for most programming tasks, including game design. You'll build up experience over time, don't worry about it :)

Crimson Wizard

#29
Quote from: Jaineshon on Sat 05/07/2014 04:46:04
Quote from: Crimson Wizard on Tue 01/07/2014 19:37:32
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).

Really? :smiley:  What happened to that friend?

I heard he became a military surgeon :).


Quote from: Radiant on Sat 05/07/2014 12:08:33
Quote from: Jaineshon on Sat 05/07/2014 04:46:04
Maybe I should learn C first?
Not particularly, no. Thinking in object orientation is a good skill, and that works better with C++.
That really depends on what kind of programs you want to work with. If you are up to making games, scripting languages could be better choice (like Lua). It was in the old times when every group of programmers created their games from scratch, now most of them use existing engines, I think, because that's much faster.

Writing low-level code (like libraries and engines) is very different from high level code (graphic interface, business logic, game design). It requires certain approach, certain mood even. Not everyone can do both well.

BTW C++ is known to be a pretty difficult language to write good programs. In some way C could be simplier, but is far less safe. Also C is built around concepts that are not very popular nowadays ("bare" pointers, unsafe data conversion and manual memory management).
People say that it is good to learn several popular languages, because that increases the chances to find good job, also you get varied experience. So you may end learning both C and C++. But that is important if you are going to become a full-time developer, and maybe not so if you want this just for a hobby.

geork

I feel like a fresh upstart who has no right to comment on this thread, since I first coded in Javascript when I was 14, on Windows XP :P By the time I finished my project I could understand the whole book I taught myself from (Java (Something) For Dummies), but still had no idea how to combine the compiler and IDE properly, so none of my code could execute. Then this new-fangled fancy AGS comes along and combines it in an easy package :D

bgordebak

#31
Quote from: Ponch on Thu 03/07/2014 04:58:54
Basic, thanks to RUN magazine. I am incredibly old! :P

C-64 machine, I should add.

Same here, BASIC on a C64, and I'm very old. I couldn't ever use the whole screen though. I needed some POKE commands I guess, or use Assembly maybe. Never got to that. And there was no internet, as some younger ones might not believe.

I remember making a sprite which dances with my joystick moves. Fun times. *sigh*

Edit: I recommend anyone starting out that try a lot of languages, and stick with the one gives you most fun for some time. In the end it doesn't matter, because you have to learn to "think" like a machine first.

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