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Comment by montenegrohugo | Hacker News Reader

"Over half of respondents had written their first line of code by the time they were sixteen, although this experience varies by country and by gender."

This really surprises me. Is it that common to take programming classes in high school? I suppose nowadays it is, but can anyone else confirm that was the case 10-20 years ago?

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In my experience, virtually all people who learned programming as children were self-taught. This was definitely the case 10-20 years ago and I don't think it has declined that much.

Maybe this is an American perspective, but I was surprised that anyone would assume children are primarily learning programming in classes. Even today, I know several elementary school children who have programming as a hobby -- they are learning on their own using the Internet for the most part.

I went to a magnet middle school in small town south GA in 1988 where we had an Applesoft Basic programming course. All of the public high schools also had elective Basic courses while I was in school.

From the best I can tell, teaching programming in was a thing in the mid 80s to mid 90s and then declined

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/09/01/kappan_kafai.ht...

I'm a weirdo.

I did not take any programming classes in high school. BUT...

My first code was at around age 7 (in the mid-1980s). I found a computer (Commodore 64, including manual) in a very rural area off the side of a road where some people dumped trash. And at school, I got invited into a special program starting around second grade, that included doing some projects in BASIC. But then I didn't really do any coding in high school. But then I majored in Computer Science. But then I dropped out...

All that is to say, at least in my low-cost-of-living area, we had this weird dichotomy where a few special snowflakes got to learn programming in primary school, but then our high school didn't offer any programming classes at all!

I was tinkering around with BASIC on any computer I could get my hands on. (Found it installed on my mum's old 80286 and on the old Dells lining my rural school's labs). That would have been in the early/mid 90's-2000's

By the time I was 15 or 16 the school had just started offering a very basic programming course that had you write programs to do simple things in Turing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language))

It was wired up to a canvas like space so we could write simple animations, etc.

That would have been in the early 2000's.

Ugh, Turing. I swear, even Pascal isn't as bondage & discipline as it.

I learned how to program on my grandparents' C64 as a wee lad nearly 30 years ago and haven't gotten away from keyboards since. I learned more on my own than I ever did in school.

I had a C++ class in high school where I felt like I really learned nothing. I never wrote anything more complex than input and print statements. I spent the entire class reading other stuff and playing videogames. It was unsupervised and learn-at-your-own-pace, so everyone could do whatever they wanted so long as you turned in a final assignment. Mine was just inputs and print statements.

I technically wrote my first line of code in that class, but I didn't actually start programming until nearly a decade later IMO.

I graduated high school in 1995, so 24 years ago. I was taking programming classes in high school.

My first programming classes were actually offered in elementary school during 4th grade, but that was only offered to "advanced" students and not part of general education. Still, that would have been about 32 years ago.

My first real programming class was in 9th grade, 1997. That class was around for a while. The language was BASIC, but covered all CS topics (if then, loops, disk i/o...and even GOTO hah!). My middle school had computers with rudimentary programming but I wouldn't consider it a real programming class.

I took programming classes in elementary school 20 years ago. It wasn’t officially a programming class but we didn’t really need 8 years of school to learn how to type and use spreadsheets so eventually anyone who was ahead of the curve was taught programming even if it was something as simple as Visual Basic.

I started programming at 15 after getting into custom WarCraft III maps, went from a GUI Interface to JASS (WC3's scripting language) and finally started using C to make my own small mini-games, I imagine it's not an uncommon path among young people that want to be game developers.

At the very least, you don’t (and didn’t) need to take classes to learn to program. Cprogramming.com and the Java trails were what I started with. (And lots of books from Barnes & Noble.)

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