How Did You Learn How To Program?

theodp writes "'Every programmer likely remembers how they learned to code,' writes GeekWire's Taylor Soper. 'For guys like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the magic began on the Teletype Model 33 (pic). For others, it may have been a few days at a coding workshop like the one I attended for journalists.' If you're in the mood to share how and in what ways your own developer days began, Soper adds, 'cyborg anthropologist' Amber Case is collecting stories to help people understand what it takes to learn how to code. Any fond computer camp stories, kids?"

Comments

Compute! Magazine

[Dan East]

When I was 10 I had a Ti-99/4A and subscribed to Compute! magazine. I'd type the BASIC programs in each month, and through the process of typing in thousands of lines of code, and then wanting to make modifications to the games (adding more lives, etc), I simply began to understand how the software controlled the behavior of the computer.

BBC

[serviscope_minor]

BBC Basic on a BBC and then asm to make it faster.

Really, BBC BASIC wasn't a bad language. Allowed proper structured programming with functions, procedures, local variables etc.

I still remember that CHR$(141) does double height text in teletext.

This has not been a useful thing to remember.

TRS 80 Model I

[MyLongNickName]

TRS-80 Model I with 4K of RAM. I was 6 and the thing came with a wonderfully put together BASIC programming manual. The beauty of the system is that you didn't need a lot of theory (any really) to get started.

10 CLS
20 PRINT "JOE WAS HERE"
30 GOTO 10

This was amazing to me. I ended up writing a few games, some math function and anything else I could do in 4K. Later on I went into programming as a career before turning to the dark side of management.

Re:I was just 10 years old

[The MAZZTer]

QBASIC here, at 8. My dad actually made some brilliant MS-DOS batch file scripts so we could store games in ZIPs on our 80MB drive and only extract them when we played them. Later iterations even scanned the game directory for changes after the game exited and zipped up only changed files into a separate archive. So if you wanted to reset a game just remove the second archive.

I never did

[coldsalmon]

What little "programming" I've done (bash scripting, HTML, MySQL, a bit of Scheme from SICP for fun) doesn't really count. What I've learned, I've taught myself based on information found online and in books. I know enough to write some useful scripts for my office Linux server, but I leave the real programming to real programmers.

One week turnaround with punch cards

[brausch]

My high school was part of a pilot project for rural schools in Minnesota in 196x. We got boxes of pre-punched, numbered (in columns 73-80), FORTRAN statements and would assemble programs from them. The teacher would send the student programs down to the Univ. of Minn. via bus and we'd get the printouts back for the next week's class. It got me hooked for life.

Why is as important as how

[meta-monkey]

"The three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris." ~ Larry Wall

Why you learned is as important as how.

1987, Apple IIe, 4th grade. My brother comvinced my dad to buy one for the house 2 years before and after one of the first "we've got to computers in the classroom!" pushes there was one in every classroom too...collecting dust because the teachers didn't know how to use it.

My brother had taught me "Hello World" in BASIC, and that combined with the Basic Apple BASIC book let me write terrible programs where the computer would ask you a name, and when you typed it in the computer would say '$name is a nerd!"

I discovered I possessed at least the first of Larry's virtues in order to avoid boring social studies projects. We'd get week-long projects where you had to "make something" about the states, or the presidents or the biosphere, so kids would make flash cards or a mobile or whatever. I wrote a quiz program ("Name That State!") that would ask you, at random, from a set of hard coded questions (ripped from the book) about the states and then tell you if you got the answer right or wrong and tallied your score at the end. This was wizardry to the teachers and I got an A.

Well they didn't really understand code reuse, and so when the next week I'd hand in "Name That President!" which was the exact same program with the questions swapped out, A again. That same code got reused for at least four years in different classes. "Name that type of cloud!" "Name that Biome!" "Name that Export of Honduras!" (Hint, it was probably 'bananas').

You'd think at some point they would have caught on and told me to do something different. Maybe they did but didn't say anything. But I kept getting As so I kept turning in the same stupid project with a 10 minute change. Kind of explains Windows, too I guess.

I learned to program by ...

[Skapare]

... NOT being distracted by Facebook and Twitter. Good thing those and the whole internet were not around back then.

Re:I learned to program by ...

[houghi]

Distraction will happen regardless of Internet. Before that there was tv, books, radio,
Facebook and Twitter are not the reason of distraction. They are the result. Distraction happens if what you are doing has no value to you at that specific moment.
I am sometimes distracted by looking aimlessly outside.