How Did You Learn How To Program? 623
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?"
Compute! Magazine (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Another "upvote" for Compute!. Between the magazine and the books, it was the key to 8-bit 6502 geekiness.
Ti-82 Pre-Cal math class (Score:3, Interesting)
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Second that (Score:3)
Grade 5, dad gets an Atari 800XL.
I asked for games, he bought in few books that had code for games in BASIC, 1000s of lines had to be punched in and saved on cassette tapes.
Soon enough I learned how to cheat with friends where I would get an unfair advantage during game play, the rest is history.
Nibble for the Apple II (Score:2)
We had an Apple II (then IIe) and my dad subscribed to Nibble magazine. This was also the glory days of Byte magazine and Beagle Bros. Every month I'd take the magazine and type in the programs in it. Then I'd spend hours debugging my code for typos. In the process I learned about program flow, subroutines, memory location calls, etc. It was better than any programming class I've had.
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Apple II Magazines [apple2history.org]
Nibble Archive [nibblemagazine.com]
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Man, that brings back memories. When my brother and I were little (like 6 or 7), mom was getting her education degree. Her professor let us hang out in this room (closet) where they kept their TI-99 with it's tape drive. It had been usurped by some Apple computers in the main computer lab. We would transcribe the programs from 3-2-1 Contact magazine (So it had to have been between 85 and 88).
We would do the same thing as you, tweaking things here and there. I remember having 100 lives in the snake game. Or
Timex Sinclair 1000 (Score:2)
2KB of RAM BABY! Unit with so little processing power, it didn't even have a BASIC tokenizer, you essentially typed the program pre-Tokenized with hard-coded keywords on the keyboard.
The real one though was the Commodore 64, and the fine line of books from Compute!, including the "Mapping the C64 and C64C" and the "6502 Assembly Language" book.
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You had so much room! I learned to program on an Ollevetti Programma 101 in 1971. It was essentially a programmable calculator with 120 possible instruction locations. It used RPN sort of.. and as you went beyond 60 or so instructions you started eating up register storage in chunks until you used up have the available registers with program storage!
The language looked something like
AV ( A label)
S (Stop for Input)
M+ (Add the Input register to the Accumulator)
A This was literally a diamond symbol and
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Luxury...
250 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of the road...
Ollevetti! (Score:3)
I started about the same time on a Ollevetti 401 I believe. A glorified numeric key pad for input and a red light, a green light and a cash register style tape for output.
I believe you will never really understand how a computer works until you have done two things:
built a compiler/parser and have done machine language programming (which was what you did with the 401).
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2K??? Only a young whippersnapper would think 2K was restrictive.
PS: Back when it was called the ZX81 it only had 1K and the display could take 768 bytes of that. People still managed to program it...
LibertyBASIC (Score:2)
C64 (Score:3)
Bought a C64 to find out about this "computer thing". When Basic turned out to be dog-slow, taught myself assembler.
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Amstrad CPC6128. I have vague memories of some character in a magazine calling himself "the hairy hacker" too, you don't get columns like that anymore.
BBC (Score:5, Funny)
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.
self-taught, of course (Score:2)
I first learned to code by reading the BASIC manual of my Sinclair ZX-81 and laboriously typing out programs one keyword at a time on that little keypad (after assembling it myself). It's amazing what you can do with 1K of RAM.
Basic Basic (Score:2)
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3-2-1 Contact (Score:3)
On a commodore 64 and later on a pc. After doing a few programs, I started breaking the code down, making changes. I must have been about 7. When I was 9, I took an official BASIC course at the local junior college in their college for kids program. In high school, I took Pascal, then majored in Computer Sciences in college where I learned C, Cobol, Java and Assembly.
TRS 80 Model I (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Same here. I could never get the cassette drive to save my program, but you'd only find that out when you'd try to load it back and discover it wiped out the program in memory with nothing off the tape. After typing the same program (it was a space battle game with ASCII ships) in about 50 times, it all started to make sense.
Then we got the Atari 400. Color. Glorious color.
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Similar story, except that the TRS-80 I used was the local Radio Shack's in-store demonstrator.
I thought it took a lot of nerve on the part of the 14-year-old shoe-gazing math nerd to attract the attention of the store manager and ask if I could interrupt the in-store demo program to type in these programs I found in the Geometry textbook our school was using. And he agreed.
I think it paid off in the long haul for him; I bought my own TRS-80 from the same guy less than a year later and wound up sinking seve
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Model I as well.
I didn't own one, but I added features (or fixed bugs) on the BASIC games that they had running on the floor model at the local Radio Shack. The store manager "paid" for specific changes in the form of discounts on purchases.
I eventually wrote a complete Monopoly game for the Model III, including graphical dice rolling. It wouldn't run on the 16KB version, though, as it was about 28KB.
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Ha! Know the feeling well. I like to think that I hacked and R/E'd my way to computer programming by reading the source to hundreds of thousands if not millions of line of code. I was 9 (1978) when I located this rabbit hole and knew then this is what I'd do for the rest of my life. There was no Google so I largely would trade pirated games or find cassettes that contained programs written in easily translatable BASIC commands which I quickly picked up. Every 'RUN' magazine was read from cover to cover.
Typing, lots of typing (Score:2)
Bashing programs from magazines into Zx81 and Spectrums.
On a CoCo (Score:2)
On a ZX Spectrum (Score:2)
Commodore computers (Score:2)
First a VIC20, where coding a loop to print "Asshole" was the pinnacle of achievement :) Then moved on to C64, where I became more proficient in Basic and some of the graphics and sound stuff. But it was the Amiga (first 500, then later 3000 and 4000) where I taught myself C and later C++. From there about a year using Windows, and then to Linux.
As I look back, I now notice that almost every system I was ever drawn to was programmer-centric. I never realized it back then, and even into post-secondary ed
I never did (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
PDP 8 field service school, at "the mill" (Score:2)
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About five years after you... on a PDP 11/40, learning BASIC as part of a program somewhat like Running Start (which didn't exist back then). Then, in college, I had a job writing code for a chain of music stores - this time on a TRS 80 of some sort. The computer i learned FORTRAN and a few dead languages on at the university was a PDP 11/70.
I probably still have some programs on paper tape, somewhere...
But to be honest - while I learned the languages at school, I learned to program by doing. Usually at a j
R: Tape Loading Error (Score:3)
BASIC Programming in High School (Score:2)
Started with BASIC programming class in high school on Commodore PETs. While in school got lent a TRS-80 at home for a bit (was a donation they didn't have any use for) so I was reading a lot more books and magazines than the class curriculum. After graduation earned enough for a VIC-20 and started getting into assembly language (ahh. hand assembly, that was fun).. and just kept going from there.
Atari 800XL (Score:2)
GW Basic + Computer Shopper (Score:2)
My dad would order disks and little booklets from computer shopper for me that would contain BASIC programs. Plus he taught me what he knew from work, although I think he used a language called JCL there in the limited capacities his job required.
Then I picked up Perl in middle and high school.
Basic on Sinclair ZX Spectrum at home. (Score:2)
And, at about the same time, Basic on a CP/M machine at my high school...
Later more Basic on Commodore 64, moved on to Pascal and Modula-2 on Atari ST.
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And, at about the same time, Basic on a CP/M machine at my high school...
Later more Basic on Commodore 64, moved on to Pascal and Modula-2 on Atari ST.
BASIC on the Spectrum for me as well. I think I was about 8-9 when I started. Did a bit of machine code (numbers, not assembler!) but didn't get into it. Got a BBC Micro, still programming in BASIC, IIRC I had some assembler routines to handle sprites taken from a magazine.
Things really took off when Dad got a PC around 1991. I started with GW BASIC, but then got my own machine and Borland C 2 a few years later. At that point I bit the bullet and started playing with assembler, and wrote my own graphic
C64 (Score:3)
I had a commodore 64 and learned from the manual. The earliest thing I remember is copying the balloon sprite code and modifying it to make a simple car game. Then saving it to.... CASSETTE tape!
IBM PC-XT 8088 (Score:2)
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Hey - you must be me! (Except for the DUCK). Did you also go on to learn C using the Borland C Compiler?
Chalkboard (Score:3)
My First Experiences (Score:2)
First experience with programming was my uncle teaching me a few commands in C64 BASIC. Where I really learned to program was on a Radio Shack MC-10 with 4k onboard and a 16k cartridge for a whopping 20k! Say what you will about the quality of the Radio Shack/Tandy computers, but they had some of the best manuals going, and I must have read my MC-10 BASIC manual from cover to cover a hundred times.
Where I think I really crossed the line and became an actual programmer was when I was loaned a VIC-20 with a b
It depends ... (Score:2)
Applesoft Basic on Apple IIe (Score:3)
A friend and I wrote a text based Baseball simulator on our own. And we did it without using "GOSUB" because we didn't know it existed.
summer of 7-8th grade middle school. (Score:2)
I convinced my mother to buy a Laser 128, which for those not familiar was a apple ][ clone priced more like a C64.
Anyway, got it home and the only software it came with was a copy of Copy II+, a disk cloning product. It did come with a nice reference manual though.
Money being tight and all, my supply of games/etc was very limited. So instead I started reading the manual, and trying to understand all basic keywords and technical jargon. By the time I was in HS, I was pretty proficient with that machine havi
Right vs Wrong (Score:2)
First learned it the wrong way - VIC 20 / C64 - Basic (with the C64 'programming manual')
Then learned the right way - PDP11/23 at the high school where I started programming first in Pascal and later in C... - in fact, I didn't really study it - It was not mandatory teaching but the school had a PDP11/23 clone and they offered "voluntary" courses for pupil. I couldn't join so I complained so loudly until they gave me an account on that machine "just to shut him up" - and I started learning programming "the
Closed devices (Score:2)
I first learned to program in BASIC on an Apple II.
I just wonder how kids are going to have the opportunity to learn to code by the time iPads and other closed devices have displaced general-purpose home computers for a large chunk of the population.
3-2-1 Contact Magazine (Score:2)
Dad's old Atari (Score:2)
When the disk drive broke I started messing around with BASIC.
UCSD 1972 (Score:2)
on a Burroughs B6700 mainframe, with punch cards, in Algol
We also had a minicomputer. To boot it, you entered the boot code in binary, with toggle switches. After booting, it loaded the OS from paper tape
Toggle switches + hex keypad (Score:2)
BASIC ? Compilers ? pffft, whatta bunch of pussies...
Graphing calculator (Score:2)
Basic on the ZX-81 (Score:2)
When you accidentally hit the table the 16KB memory extension it used to erase the program before you could save it to tape.
After that, Basic and assembler on Commodore Plus 4, then Amiga, Macintosh Plus, and Pascal, CommonLisp, and Prolog on various university machines - Sun workstations and Next cubes, if I recall correctly. I've never programmed professionally, though, and am currently being paid for doing logic by hand on paper as opposed to using a theorem prover. :-)
Underway to Wake Island in 1992... (Score:3)
I had previously dabbled in logo, basic, Applesoft basic, et cetera.
Heard we were being deployed to Wake Island for a downed aircraft recovery (interesting term when the aircraft is in 17,000+ feet of water...)
So, I bought a little book titled "Learn C in 3 days" - http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61OPqyHTH%2BL.jpg [images-amazon.com]
Then I bought a copy of Turbo C++.
Installed it on the log room computer when the Chiefs weren't looking and coded away the long trip to Wake Island from Hawaii at 8-12 knots (and the way back.)
I'd always been good with computers before, but after this I was totally hooked on coding.
Apple II (Score:2)
One week turnaround with punch cards (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Logo on an Apple II (Score:2, Interesting)
In 3rd or 4th (1990ish) grade we had an amazing computer teacher, started out just drawing cool designs, then learned more, and ended up making a digital clock from scratch, meaning I had to create procedure to draw the numbers and a control program to trigger the process with time delays.
LOL ... (Score:3)
Logo at computer camp when I was 11, followed by basic on a TRS-80 color computer, then eventually basic on a 8088 machine, Pascal, PDP-11 assembly and C in university, and some interesting chances to do some bare-metal programming along the way.
I still don't meet a lot of people who have done interrupt-level programming and accessing hardware directly via registers and writing your own interrupt handlers.
Good times.
Opened QBasic (Score:3)
Ranger Rick (Score:2)
I wonder if anybody else remembers some issues of Ranger Rick having BASIC program listings? My first program was typing in one of those, which ended up playing a tune from Bach on the computer speaker. I was really blown away by that.
I made so many typos that it didn't work the first 3 or 4 times I entered it.
PDP/8 TSS8 ASR33 110baud dialup (Score:2)
Started in 1972 with 110 (?) baud dialup on an ASR-33 teletype from Junior High to the High School's DEC PDP-8 [wikipedia.org] mini running TSS88. IIRC it had 8K 12-bit words of memory. Had to dial (yes, rotary dial) the phone number and put the handset into the Acoustical Coupler. Off line storage was to paper tape. Started with BASIC, then moved on to assembler and FOCAL. Then in High School they upgraded to a PDP-11 running RSTS/E. Wow -- was that thing FAST! <grin>
Typed in many, many basic programs from D
Assembly on a Time Share System 36 (Score:2)
It was 1972 and I was in the 8th grade. Our math teacher thought it would be fun as we flew through the course requirements.
My first major project was in 1979 and I had to debug a stats suite written in Fortran. Translated that into BASIC for a Tektronic Graphing station and then again to BASICA for the PC.
Does hard-wiring lab setups count? What language would that be?
In grad school I used an old PDP8 to control the lab. ( Did anyone ever come across SKED? ) And by then, I was reading every computer bo
The worst way possible... (Score:2, Insightful)
....by debugging Excel macros.
Perl (Score:2)
I feel old. (Score:2)
I first learned *about* programming when I was 10 (1977) by reading a small paperback book about the Basic language. I wrote on paper with pencil to learn some very rudimentary programming. I didn't learn on a real computer until 1979 or 1980 - at my junior high school - and that was originally using an Atari 400 or 800. We also learned on an IBM card reader connected to a university unix server using only a wide-carriage printer as the output, no screen at all. I also learned on a Tandy TRS-80 and an Apple
Why is as important as how (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
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After submitting this, I realized that if in 2013 a kid wrote a program at school that asks for a student's name and then calls him a nerd, he'd probably be arrested for cyber-bullying and banned from using computers for 7 years.
Access to college computers (Score:2)
Apple ][e : BASIC and assembly, self taught at 12 (Score:2)
First with Apple ][e , self taught by books at 12yo:
In the order:
- Applesoft BASIC , spaghetti code
- 6502 Assembly, no assembler, spaghetti code
- 6502 Assembly with LISA assembler, still spaghetti code
Then on PC, with school courses at 18:
- Turbo Pascal: the revelation of structured programming
Later: OO programming (by courses and books), and then many languages self taught.
What I see is that I needed a good mentor to get rid of bad habits and silly programming techniques.
Self taught with language re
Self taught (Score:2)
Back in the early 80's, I remember the scene clearly. Math class, there was a computer (TRS-80 Model III) in the back of it one day. Teacher had each of us during class type out:
10 PRINT "OUR NAME";
20 GOTO 10
Needless to say, i was hooked. Started teaching myself basic, and started hexediting. Didn't know what assembly was (wish I did), but I loved looking at programs with a hex editor. Which lead me to being able to copy copy protected samples my typing teacher would get later when I was in high sc
PDP-11C (Score:2)
Actually maybe even before that, it happened incrementally. Back in the mid-60's my Father and his business partner had a consulting firm they ran out of the basement. They built all sorts of custom hardware for mostly the Air Force. He taught me basic electronics, and then when he went to work for another larger company we'd go into work on Saturday and I'd type in FORTRAN programs onto punch cards for him (but I didn't know what they did exactly). Eventually, sometime circa 1970 he was working for a place
ZX Spectrum Basic (Score:2)
First I learned how to create cool looking patterns using series of PRINTs and graphical symbols.
Then I learned how to use DRAW, PLOT and CIRCLE to create pictures.
Then one of my parents showed my how to use FOR loop to draw a sinusoid.
Learning BASIC on Spectrum was quite easy even without any manual. Due to a fancy input system all the keywords and functions were printed on the keyboard. I learned what they do by trial and error.
Apple II basic (Score:2)
It was Apple II basic. Then QBASIC, then Visual Basic, then ZZT, then Kilk & Play, then Games Factory, then C++ and assembly, then C#.
Build A Computer (Score:3)
I've taken classes in Basic, C++, Java, other languages. I've read "exceptional" and "effective" and other books to improve my craft over the years.
But building from the ground up in an introduction to digital logic class way back in 1978 still had the most profound impact on my ability to know what's happening in a computer and on my ability to understand what's really going on "under the hood", even 35 years later.
It literally started with diodes and transistors. Building 'and' and 'or' and 'nor' (and...) gates. Hooking them together to make a flip flop. Then taking pre-built gates and making a counter. On to a simple cpu (that only knew a couple of 'instructions', IIRC). When I built an 8080 based computer, I actually knew how it worked. There has always been something comforting knowing that, deep down inside even the most powerful processors, it's still just a bunch (ok, a WHOLE LOT) of gates.
Unless this whole quantum thing gets properly defined and implemented and catches on. Maybe I'll get to start over.
Typing in games (Score:2)
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99er Magazine (Score:2)
I punched in TI BASIC code from the magazine pages and saved my programs on a cassette tape. I also learned some TI LOGO. That was in 1983. In '84, I remember programming in Atari BASIC in a school club.
TRS-80, basic, then ML (Score:2)
In '77, my dad got a TRS-80 (model 1, level 2, cassette drive). My brothers and I (well, mostly me) learned basic (Dad would buy us a game at RS if we demonstrated a working program). When my programs started to look more peek & poke than print, he got a debugger so I could edit the machine code directly in hex.
Several things (Score:2)
I learend some assembly on the Apples but not much. I was always more of a hardware hacker. I could rewire, jury rig, and repair like no ones business. I could get a cranky tape drive or out of speed floppy bac
I learned to program by ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... NOT being distracted by Facebook and Twitter. Good thing those and the whole internet were not around back then.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Atari 400 (Score:3)
My dad was a big dreamer, and he saw lots of potential in early arcade games. We had a Pong game in our house in 1979, because my dad thought he could rent it out. Eventually he offered to buy me a game system to get me off the Pong game, and I asked for an Atari 400, mostly because I thought it was better than the 2600, so I could lord it over my friends. My friends weren't impressed because of the smaller game catalog, but I nearly melted that chiclet keyboard as I taught myself to program in BASIC with it. By age 13 I had designed my own version of Breakout (better than Pong, because I could play it by myself) and was working on adventure games.
Buy a kid a computer with any programming language, and they will learn it.
MSX Basic (Score:3)
I started when I was around 12 years old, on a Philips VG8010. I believe my friends had 386 PCs at that time. I did not have a lot of games on tape so I started reading the computer user's manual (which teaches programming). The book was a really good introductory material because I managed to learn pretty much everything by myself ... well except sprites, which was only a few years later that I actually managed to understood how they worked :P
Nobody else here starting with a MSX ??
curiosity (Score:3)
Before home computers (Score:3)
My graduate work was in computational quantum chemistry, and I had a part-time job in the university computing center. Gave me the opportunity to dabble in lots of different things. We got one of the earliest CDC 6600 supercomputers and learning how to get the most out of that beast was a challenge.
By the time I was done with my chemistry PhD, it was pretty clear to me that computing was where I should spend my career. The university was starting a Computer Science department in 1968, and I was invited to be one of the first faculty. I taught mainly in programming languages and programming techniques. I was mainly self-taught. I had long-since left academia before I got my first home computer, a C64. In 1984 I had a chance to buy a FatMac at the Apple employee store, and the rest is history.
Re:I was just 10 years old (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Start with curiosity, them experiment ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think learning to program starts with picking something you are curious about. Ex: How could I do [insert problem here] on a computer? Then figure out how to do it using the hardware and language at hand.
For me one example was a blackjack card game. As I learned more, both in a formal CS program and in my o
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I couldn't agree more. Once you "get it" the language details are just that - details. When someone says they know ".NET" but don't know how to code Java I think to myself "this person really doesn't get programming". Sure the syntax is different, there are different quirks & ways of doing things but in the end it all boils down to learning the same sorts of details you learn all the time using an API or a new part of the language you've never used before.
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I have mixed feelings on this one. When it comes to the worlds of Java and .Net "knowing" has more to do with having a good concept of what is in the libraries and how the libraries are organized than anything else. There is something to that. Having a largish portion of that committed to memory both improves ones productivity and impacts ones thinking about how to solve a problem at the same time.
Though like you I'd expect someone who is really good with one to be able to start working with the other al
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As my professor put it: If you learn 10 methods every day you'll be dead before you learn everything that's in Java.
I don't know how accurate that is but I agree with the sentiment: a typical programmer simply can't keep that much in memory and remember all the relevant details - the big picture is definitely an asset but that can be learned fairly quickly. Knowing where to start looking and drawing on past experience is definitely an asset, though I think that's part of why older programmers don't fare a
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I hear that.
My parents bought an Amstrad 286 (12MB hard drive space! 512KB RAM! VGA graphics! 3.5" floppy drive! MS-DOS 5.01!) and it came with this enormous GWBASIC manual. I was 8 years old and had been mildly curious about computers for a couple years, but my dad wouldn't let me touch his TRS-80. My grandfather had a Commodore 64 that I knew enough about to load games, but that was it. Once we got that 286 with the huge GWBASIC manual, I realized that I could tell the computer what to do, too. After that
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Oh, yes. We always did that, too. I remember when I later got a 386 and was astonished that it auto-parked the heats when you shut it off. SORCERY.
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Yeah, punch cards had this feature whereby you could randomize the order of the lines.