Ask HN: How did you learn programming? How long did getting good take?

I learned programming from a book Make Your Own Video Games which was in the library of my (not so well off) Chicago public school. We didn't have a computer, but I found out you can simulate a BASIC program with graph paper. That was twenty-something years ago.

My trajectory as a programmer has gone from sucking lots to sucking less. I might get good someday.

I first played around with DOS on an 8088 back at school. I'd edit batch files and make it print out amusing things. Made a text adventure, self-replicating files etc. I then tried editing an exe file to change it, and realized it wasn't quite that simple. Later on, I found QBASIC and used it to write "real" programs, such as little animations and an alarm clock using the PC speaker. I learned some Pascal at school, which is where I found out about flow control structures and functions. Later on, as a teen, I played around a lot with Delphi, finally getting over the disappointment of not being able to edit .exe files that I had as a child. I made a lot of one-off programs I'd put on CDs with autorun as greeting cards and personal messages to friends. I later did a couple of months of VB at school, but didn't learn anything new compared to what I could already di with Delphi. I sneaked into the high school Java classes when I was in 8th grade, and thanks to a particularly tolerant teacher got to unofficially participate. I learned Java and C basics at university classes I took as part of a cooperation agreement between my high school and the local university. Later, officially in university, I took more Java classes and learned what I could of C++ on my own. I was fairly comfortable with C, but C++ was frustrating, because a lot of the complexity felt unnecessary. I stuck with Java for the most part. I wrote C++ and Java at a number of research assistant jobs, and learned bash script and awk on the side for one-off tasks. my first exposure to Python was when a student at a course I was TAing asked if they could submit work in Python. I accepted that, and learned a fair bit from dissecting that program. I didn't touch Python for a while after that. Later, at another job, I did C# one-off programs for psychological experiments. On the side, I was playing around with virtual reality and used Vizard, which is a 3d visualization package built on Python. I started playing around with Python seriously at that point. I now write mostly in Python, except for C and C++ bits for performance-dependent stuff and hardware interfacing (which I use from Python with ctypes.)

How long did getting good take? It's hard to say. I feel I've learned something from each of those experiences, and gotten better in the process. I'd say I've gotten to the level where I'm confident in my skills as a programmer within the last couple years, as I've seen meaningful things done with my code.

'77-78 school year: Punched card FORTRAN IV (really more like a II) on the IBM 1130. Prompted me to start and never stop studying software engineering ("structured programming" et. al. was the rage back then).

Summer '78: most everything but C and the like on a rich UNIX V6 system. Focus then besides exploration was still writing the best quality systems, started learning how to work on other people's code bases helping others with their final class projects.

After some time off for first year of college, starting in the summer of '80 heavy duty C (Lions' notes best reference then) on UNIX V7 and BSD 2.x. Plus playing around with Lisp Machines.

'82-83 Lisp at LMI, although wasn't able to get a whole lot of time in (Lisp Machines were scarce back then). First serious work with SICP and Scheme.

'84: C on a variety of 68000 BSD UNIX workstations. Learned how to grok and port code between these subtlety different systems. Also some Common Lisp on PCs, followed by the T Lisp dialect.

'85 on, moved from working on ersatz versions of EMACS to the real thing (mostly Gosling, which was what Gnu EMACS started from), some heavy duty debugging required to find wild pointers (e.g. ATRON on 8088). More work on other people's code and first client-server project.

Long break for more school and aftermath in a period when Route 128 was dying.

'90 or so, MS-DOS and Sun OS C (WORM filesystem and system interfaces), followed by C on Windows 3/3.1 and Sun OS 4.x. Starting transition from journeyman to master.

After various C and Oracle consulting work, transition complete in mid-90s with a serious greenfield C++ client server system using OOSE methodology (The Unified Process nowadays). That's when I considered myself to have become "good".

With all the interruptions and distractions (was trying to become a scientist in this period, but finances got in the way), took perhaps 10 years of concentrated effort in 20 calendar years.

I was a MAD Magazine fan and in a Super Special issue in the early 90's they included BASIC program source code printed in the magazine. I sat down and typed the whole thing in line by line and printed a full-screen pic of Alfred. E. Neuman. That was why I started going through the BASIC manual at the age of 9 or 10. It took getting a job writing JSP/Servlets to get 'better', but still not 'good' 20 years on.

I learned programming in BASIC at age 10 when a computer-science-teacher uncle of mine explained how Super Mario worked. It was all a bit over my head but after about a week I was drawing some Mario-inspired shapes on the screen. The next big push came when I taught myself to do early CGI-based stuff: it was just so exciting to be able to share something with dozens (!) of people. If you define being good as "being able to pick up a new language in a few days" then yeah, I guess I'm good & I think that's a goal well worth pursuing. Picking up a new language will expose yourself to new constructs & practises, it trains your programming muscle. If you define good as "expert at programming task X" then, sadly, I am not very good. The best part about programming is that you never stop learning. That uncle of mine is now well into retirement and he's still programming microcontrollers for fun.

Learned Sinclair BASIC when I was 10ish. Graduated to the C64 and a BBC Micro through school, ended up doing C and a load of ARM assembler by 16. Picked up PHP, Delphi and Java at college, got PHP and Java work after then. Got into Python 5 years ago, then Ruby 4 years ago, and dabbled in C# in the interim. In the last year I've picked up Common Lisp and Clojure after trying (and generally failing) to make headway in Haskell.

I've only started to think of myself as a "good" programmer in the last couple of years, but I'm not so sure it's a healthy perspective - it's mainly in response to increasingly interacting with other peoples' code and realising how shoddy a lot of it actually is.

And I'm still learning :-)

I started programming BASIC when I was 9 after finding some code in my school math text book. I had a VTech PreComputer1000 [1] which had a button labeled "BASIC" - so I put two and two together a figured out that I could type in the code from my math book into the computer and make it run.

From there I was hooked.

How long did getting good take? Well, that was 16 years ago, and I think I'm still working on improving everyday. But, how long before I felt proficient at it? Probably a few years or so...

[1] http://rasterweb.net/raster/computers/images/vtech.jpg

I learned just before leaving the military. A contractor said, "Learn Perl and you'll have no problem finding a job". So, I grabbed the "Learning Perl" book and forced my way through it. I was horrible (a Linux 'man' page wrapper; or basically system()). I do remember the day, while working on a project, that it all "clicked". All the concepts suddenly made sense. I'm good now, but not great. I can solve problems in just about any programming language. This is 10+ years later.

Why did you need to create a new account to ask a question?

Anyway, it depends on how much you practise (in both senses of the word) and/or challenge yourself. If you're learning to build web sites, say, maybe by the 5th or so project you're beginning to feel like you know what you're doing. Maybe by the 10th you are confident enough of your skills that you feel like you can apply for a job, if that's what you want.

The key is to just start work on something ASAP.