Slashdot Asks: How Did You Learn How To Code?

Last week Apple's CEO argued that computer programming should be a 'second language', and that it should be a required subject for all students starting in 4th grade. But a large number of professional programmers didn't learn how to code in a formal school program, either because they're self-taught or because they learned on the job. There's a lot of abstract discussions about the best ways to teach coding, but if there's any group that's uniquely qualified to answer that question, it's the Slashdot community.

So leave your answers in the comments. How did you learn how to code?

Comments

Picked up a book.

[PhrostyMcByte]

Thank my Uncle for introducing me to DOOM when I was ~10 years old. -- immediate "I want to make that". And so I picked up some books from the library.

2 week FORTRAN short course at JC. Lied about age.

[HornWumpus]

I was off and running. Self taught basic, 6502 and Z-80 assembler. Worked two summers to buy my first microcomputer.

Learned a bunch translating various basic dialects. Typing games in from Creative Computing etc.

Backfilled informal programming education with EE and CompE degrees.

I can spot the potential future programmer among 10 year olds playing. The future programmer is working puzzles requiring thought.

On an ALWAC IIIE

[FredK]

Computer class in school, spring of 1959. Coded in Hex, 512 bytes of memory (recirculating drum), 32K mass storage that was so big one didn't know what to do with it. Solved differential equations, linear systems with rational coefficients, and computed root locus diagrams. When somebody came along to add an assembler I didn't see the point, as it wouldn't even let you use instructions as data, and made it more difficult to plan jumps to account for the rotation of the drum. If you used floating point you lost 128 bytes of the memory. It was a very different world.

Programming, not coding

[GreatDrok]

i learnt to program at school from a Ph.D computer scientist. We never even had computers in the class. We learnt to break the problem down into sections using flowcharts or pseudo-code and then we would translate that program into whatever coding language we were using. I still do this usually in my notebook where I figure out all the things I need to do and then write the skeleton of the code using a series of comments for what each section of my program and then I fill in the code for each section. It is a combination of top down and bottom up programming, writing routines that can be independently tested and validated.