How did you get into programming?

[Mackie]

It's a general question. What event, person, etc. Got you interested in programming in the first place and when?

Not necessarily my most significant moment, but defiantly sparked my interest. In grade 3 or 4, Neopets was all the rage. So I was just hanging out on Neopets when I came accross there profiles. SO I was like OMG you can MAKE websites! (I was stupid). They used HTML, and had a tutorial on it. So I looked into it and learned things like:

code:

<b> <i> <u> <s> <br>

After that I kept asking questions like, where are the websites? Oh whats a server? How can I get one? etc.

I learned more HTML, CSS, Lua, PHP, Turing, VB, Ruby, Python (Not in that order). And I'm still going.

That's my story. Please share yours!

[btiffin]

I was born for it. Took all my money from working on a fish tug and bought me a TRS/80 Model I. I was 16ish. While learning the BASIC that came with the machine (took all of an afternoon) I picked up TASM, Z-80 assembler. But it needed a better debugger than T-BUG so I started to write my own. 16K of RAM. My debugger could load into high or low hence Debug HILO. That got me sent to the first ever Canada Wide Computer Science Fair in 1982. Then it was off to Waterloo for my first ever real programming class. (We didn't have any computers in my high-school until my last year and that was a typing course and a lot of Space Invaders - I got to spend my time writing a student database for my electronics teacher).

At Waterloo it was COBOL, Pascal and 6809 assembler courses. On the side I've taught myself

Fortran, Ada, SNOBOL, Icon, Unicon, Forth, awk, shell, TCL/Tk, DCL, JCL, Modula-2 and 3, Oberon, Python, Sather, Eiffel, C, C++, Java, APL, J, R, D, Dylan, Limbo, Hypercard, REXX, BLISS, quite a few assemblers, quite a few BASICs, a few of the markups (SGML, XML, HTML/CSS), Lisp, Scheme, dBASE II, PL/SQL, Prolog, Erlang, LUA, Ruby, IBI FOCUS, Factor, Joy, OCaml, Pike, Smalltalk, Squeak, Haskell, Io, ECMAScript (Javascript), Logo, Maple, Matlab, and a few others. But the quest ended at REBOL. Well, since being here, maybe I'll try coding up an app in Turing, but my search for the best language ended with REBOL.

I didn't really get into programming, programming got into me. When I'm bored I open a debugger and try hand assembly, or used to, before the web.

<vent>
Growing up I was a Microsoft evangelist, but booted up Coherent more often than not ... then MS laughed as they killed OS/2 while promising "Chicago" (Windows 95) for like 3 years, so now I'm agin 'em. GNU/Linux makes a far better development environment anyway and I now like to promote OSS and value added commercial endeavours. I'd never pirate, but I'm somewhat glad that the largest theft base in the world is Microsoft products. Good on them. I really do hope that there is a huge crackdown someday soon, GNU/Linux stands ready. If all the people that stole MS/Office were told they'd go to prison for theft over, I can only assume that OpenOffice would rule. But I do miss OS/2. It would have been great and by now we would be talking to our computers (and they would be singing back) instead of us getting carpal tunnel and BSOD.
</vent>

Cheers,
Brian Tiffin

[zylum]

Well I grew up playing sports and video games. One day in grade 9 I got this idea in my head that I would start making my own games. So I went to the local chapters and picked up a book on game design in flash. Although theres lots of animation you can do in flash, I spent most of my time learning how to program in Actionscript. My foray into Actionscript lead to stuff like this, this and this.

In grade 10 I was introduced to Turing through my programming class. Because of Turing's speed advantage compared to (at the time) Flash's Actionscript as well as its easy to program graphics, I quickly forgot about Flash. This is when I really started programming. I spent hours a day doing all sorts of experiments many of which are posted throughout the forums.

In grade 11 I was told about the CCC, so I started training. I looked for resources on the web for algorithm competitions and found TopCoder.com. Since (at the time) TopCoder only supported C/C++, Java and VB I decided to learn Java. Thus throughout grades 11-12 I spent most of my time learning Java/various algorithms and working on personal projects in Turing. TopCoder was definitely a great learning experience for me. After doing it for a few months I found I would write more concise and bug free code as their competitions promoted speed and accuracy. I am quite competitive, so to learn faster I convinced some of my friends to do TopCoder with me. Matches are held about once a week so we'd spend many hours studying the algorithms. When the competition came, I always had a heightened pulse as adrenaline was racing through my veins. TopCoder was a lot of fun but I haven't done it in ages

Now I am in University which takes up a lot of my time, so I don't program casually as much as I would like. The benefit is that I get to learn a lot of great languages I might not have learned on my own such as C/C++, Python, Scheme, ML, Prolog, Perl... I still do work on personal projects, but they are more complex and take longer to complete as I have less time to devote to them.

Recently, I started learning Actionscript 3.0 as I got this idea I would start my own casual gaming site. I see many games on the internet that are of poor quality that are quite popular and think to my self that I can do a lot better. And this is where my journey leaves off. I look forward to programming for many more years and hopefully make a career of it

[Nick]

I myself started half a year ago (since yesterday it's the exact date) I thought that "computer science" would bo something hardware about the computer so I took the class. When the class started, to my surprise, we did programming, needless to say I was comfused, hawever I was also quite excited. I look back as a happy acident.

Also since I was a kid I always had an interset in gaming, I know a lot of people say that but no one was like me (beat the origanal Mario at age 2). When anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I said "video game maker" (as I said I was young lol).

I've since made games, some posted on the site some not. I'm now taking a java course I'm looking forward to ace. I am tring to teach myself Python as well right now.

And that my friends, is my story.

[Euphoracle]

I started by doing really dumb stuff in VB6 with a friend, and then he continued to do his stuff in VB6 and I moved on to C#, C++ (hopefully D soon), Java and Turing from school, Lua and other scripting languages. I haven't really done anything major; I still have a lot to learn.

[michaelp]

I wanted to play downloaded games on my PSP...
Then I kept learning about the PSP, and there was homebrew. (Games made for the PSP with an unofficial SDK.)
I used Luaplayer for the PSP, then decided to go to the PC for programming. I was using C++.

[MichaelM]

I always played viedo games, and of course, got ideas for my own games. I first started in Game Maker, which hardly counts as programming. I also fooled around with Maya alot making wierd animations. Then just last semester I has my first Computer Science Class and learned Turing and thats as far as I've gone so far

[PaulButler]

I learned the basics of QBASIC at a summer camp when I was 8, and I liked it. My dad knows BASIC, so I had him show me more. I spent a while programming trivial little things in basic, and then I found some C and VB books that my dad had. I didn't really get the hang of C until later, but I managed to teach myself VB.

[Saad]

I got into programming from my CS class. I really only took it because I needed a credit, and heard interesting stuff about it.

But even in CS class I really didn't find it interesting, but after a while there were interesting problems which I couldn't solve and so I came to compsci.ca, and after that I'm hooked.

[A.J]

I started a couple of months back. I didn't know about programming untill the beginning of this year (grade 10).
I heard about this site from saad.
And here i am.

[cavetroll]

I got started at the beginning of last year in my comp sci/ business class. I found Turing on the computer and I knew I was going to learn it eventually. I decided I would start early so I could be better than everyone when we started. Turns out it worked. Eventually people found out so I spent like more than half the class away from my own computer. I enjoyed it (the programming not helping people) and continued to more advanced languages.

[PaulButler]

cavetroll @ Sat Feb 02, 2008 1:11 am wrote:

I got started at the beginning of last year in my comp sci/ business class. I found Turing on the computer and I knew I was going to learn it eventually. I decided I would start early so I could be better than everyone when we started. Turns out it worked. Eventually people found out so I spent like more than half the class away from my own computer. I enjoyed it (the programming not helping people) and continued to more advanced languages.

Helping other people might be annoying, but I find it's one of the best ways to re-enforce what you know. You might not realize it, but you probably get more out of it than your friends do .

[Mackie]

Ya, I had the same experience when I started my computer science course in September. I already had quite a bit of programming experience. So I just jumped into Turing like there was no tomorrow. I spend the entire class helping people. Which I didn't mind. Other than I suck at explaining things in simple terms.

[TokenHerbz]

I started with the most basic several years ago, making UMS maps in starcraft, the idea and concept of creating things under my control was very interesting for me, and in school i learned Java.... Then i learned turing... so thats my story.

[Bored]

My interest in programming first started at a young, age I'm not sure when. I saw the power of being able to create a program, to make a game, and mostly I wanted to be a Hacker because I thought they were cool, and i had dreams of hacking an FBI database. Anyways those eventually subsided, but it was my Step Brother who really sparked my interest. I used to always see him programming, and often making games, which really intrigued me having been a gamer as far back as I can remember (I had an old Odyssey 2 at age 4). When I was in grade 7 I asked him to show me how to program, he gave me a quick tutorial in BASIC and some websites to look into. My first program was a pokedex which allowed you to input a pokemon and then had 150 if statements that would output the proper data, because that's really all I knew how to do. It would then ask if you wanted to quit and loop back if you didn't. I've been programming ever since, picking up HTML in grade 8 and dabling in python, then Truing in grade 9, and since then I've learnt Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, and C# and I've looked into c++, ASP, and java. Oh Yes I also did some scripting in UT for a while somewhere in there.