Ask HN: How young were you when you started programming and how did it happen? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How young were you when you started programming and how did it happen?

1 pointherodoturtle6 comments

Dear HN readers,

I was recently intrigued by a thread of comments on here between a handful of seasoned developers that have been programming for a relatively long time (~30 years), and was particularly fond of what they had to say about how they got started.

So given the wide spectrum of readers on this forum, I am deeply curious to get a sense of how our programming "origin" stories have evolved over time.

I believe that being able to contrast the stories of developers that started out a long time ago to those that started out more recently will be a fascinating exercise.

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In my case it was around 1995 - I was 11 years old at the time, and we had a PC at home which my brother and I would play games on. It ran DOS 6.22, and on one of its installation disks we found this game called GORILLA.BAS [1].

An attempt to reverse engineer this source file (in pursuit of more explosive bananas) sent me down an exploratory path that ultimately became my life-long career.

It was a rather lucky sequence of events for which I am extremely grateful.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncykt-YJO1M

In 1979, I went to university to receive course advice in my chosen field, the adviser I got was trying fill the empty courses, not recommend what was best for me.

One of the courses was computer programming in Pascal, offered for the first time. There were several hundred students enrolled and they ran duplicate day and night sessions of the course.

The course was designed to make 'trial and error' programming as difficult as possible, so we would learn enough about the syntax to write working code straight up.

For the 250 odd students they had 8 card punch machines. You had to punch out your cards, wrap them up and put them in the mail to be run overnight, you went back to pick up your finished program the next day.

The 8 card punch machines were hammered 24/7 and by the end of the second week two broke down. A week later one of them would not punch the letter 'B'.

Unfortunately the course took up as much time as my other 3 subjects so I withdrew, but I did learn a lot about programming, especially when I bought a decent programmable calculator. I did go on to do a bit more programming but it wasn't my main job.

I switched from Windows to Mac in 2009 for professional reasons and the Mac software landscape at the time was far from what it is today. I got very keen on getting some tried and true Windows software to work on Mac which in some cases led me to discover half-baked open source software solutions that barely worked and were unmaintained. I guess this was the first time I thought to myself: "Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to know how to program."

I taught myself C at the age of 25 and approached a computer science degree shortly afterwards. That open source software is still unfixed but I'm glad it sent me down this path.

I started coding when I was 12-13, when me and my bro got a C64 for Christmas one year. I learnt Basic and quickly moved onto 6502 assembly language, learning to hack games for infinite-lives, level selection, etc., plus a little bit of demo/intro coding. I learnt a lot by looking at the code of others — including much disassembling of object code. I was always interested in how folks were making things happen in games, how they were using the hardware.

When I was 17, I dropped out of college to take a job in games development. My first dev system was a second C64, but was quickly replaced by a BBC Model B, which in turn was replaced with an 8Mhz 286 Tandon PC, 2mb of RAM, EGA graphics, 5.25" floppy drives, 40mb HD, and a PDS card [0][1]. You'd assemble the code on the host, send it down to the target — IIRC, PDS had some handy debugging tools: breakpoints, single step, etc. Pretty impressive for the time, given the target platforms.

Later I learnt some assembly language for other common processors at the time (z80, 68k, 8086), and also started learning C/C++.

When the internet started to become more of a popular thing, I started learning both Javascript/variations and Java, and also picked up some VB skills.

Mid-90s, somewhat tired of games dev, I transitioned from games to front- and back-end web-based stuff, spending a number of years with a fairly successful startup company specialising in e-commerce.

Since then I've also learnt, and delivered projects in, a multitude of languages. Including (in no particular order) C#, Typescript, Python, Go.

So I've been coding for maybe 35+ years now, just over 30 years of which have been commercially/professionally.

I like coding. I am often particularly fascinated by interesting algorithms.

[0] https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/PDS_development_system

[1] https://retro-hardware.com/2019/05/29/programmers-developmen...

I was 8 years old in 1983 when my parents bought the original IBM PC model 5150. It had 64k of RAM, two 5¼" floppy drives, and a CGA video card. By the end of its life, it had 576k of RAM, a VGA video card, and 2 20MB MFM hard drives. Oh, and an NEC V20 CPU in place of the original 8088.

I took a BASIC programming course at Radio Shack on the TRS-80 and was otherwise self-taught (sometimes learning /with/ my dad) until university. (I took computer science in high school, too, but didn't learn anything new :) )

Also extremely grateful for these events!

I love that you remember all the technical details too :-)

Our PC was an i486DX2-66. It had 1Mb of SIMM memory which I soon upgraded to EDO (purely to run better games!).

It also had a 400Mb hard drive which hamstrung me - and so out of desperation I took to running DBLSPACE - which if I recall correctly was buggy and rendered the system useless.

I was too scared to tell my folks that I'd "broken" our PC (they had no idea as they never used it themselves). But the sleepless nights of me trying to solve the issue was also quite formative in my learning experience.

From programming in BASIC I soon moved on to graphics programming in C - mostly thanks to tuts that I found on BBS forums (shout-out to Denthor if he ever reads this).

And from there the inevitable university degree in Computer Science and the career path that followed :-)

I learned how to program at school in 1973, when I was 17 on a machine similar to this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_9800_series#Second_generati...

It may seems a toy, but it was not, it had 8K bytes. It was a time where big computers in France had 128K bytes RAM.

What is astonishing is that it was in Vannes, a small town in Brittany, in the west part of France.

I often wonder how the Math teacher was able to get such a computer in his school.

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