How I learned to program

49 points by acwatt 4 years ago | 9 comments

ulzeraj 4 years ago |

I don't want to sound negative but "I code since I was a toddler" articles are one of the main reasons I've took a long time to work on proper coding skills.

Being from a poor family we didn't had access to any kind of computer while growing up. For some miraculous reason I still managed to secure a good career around system administration but my coding necessities never went beyond simple bash routines. Living on the field you read lots of these stories about how marvelous it was when the author as a child got his first computer and started coding basic. And I thought... "I'm in my 30s so I'll never be able to have the fraction of skill of that guys so why bother".

I was in my mid 30s when I needed something and just started doing it. It was good and it felt good. It wasn't that bad. Why did it took me so long to start? Because everyone who writes stories about coding has started since they were like 10 years old!

Sorry to rain my ramblings on your story. In the end I have no-one to blame but myself. The article was good and interesting.

JKCalhoun 4 years ago | |

That's too bad. I am old enough that as a toddler I would have had to learn ALGOL to be coding from that age.

We were poor as well but my school was rich enough to have picked up Apple II's just as I was in the middle of moving though high school. So I at least got a taste of BASIC when I was sixteen or so. I took a gap-decade though and would be in my mid-twenties before I started coding for real (and then it was Pascal).

Perhaps we do need more stories like that though.

Aside: famously, that John Carmack guy also went to my high school — he was a few years younger than me. I'm not sure if he used the same machines I had learned BASIC on. I read though that he got in trouble trying to break in and steal computers from some school or another, perhaps when he was in junior high (middle school) though? Maybe he was hanging with the wrong crowd then.

t-3 4 years ago | | |

I'm young enough that even in elementary school we had computers, but they only taught us typing and Microsoft Office. Even in high school the most advanced courses were using Dreamweaver to fill out templates and calling it web design. If I hadn't gone looking for "free software" because I wanted to play games, I probably wouldn't know anything at all about computers.

bcrl 4 years ago | | |

I was lucky enough to get exposed to QuickBASIC and AmigaBASIC in the latter part of the 1980s which introduced me to much more structured programming than the old style line numbered based BASIC implementations. That was quite the step forward, and really helped when I started programming in C.

felistoria 4 years ago | |

I'm basically in the same boat. Every time I read something like this it is pretty discouraging. I'm a manager in an IT department and have dabbled in programming and really enjoyed it, but I feel like no matter what I'll never be good enough to get a job doing it because I didn't have opportunities to do it when I was young. Bummer.

mmcgaha 4 years ago | |

Thank you for sharing that and giving me a touch more wisdom today. I can see how saying that I started young could put off someone who just wants to learn. I always mention it because it was a magical time for me but I never considered that it could discourage someone.

bluenose69 4 years ago |

I agree with the if-I-could-redo-this statement I would tell myself to set aside time, at work even, to go deeper on the things that I didn’t know.

Spending time to learn things usually pays off. In recent years, I've seen students try to solve problems by searching the web for "solutions". The result is often a cobbled-together mess, with unused variables and and the inclusion of a wide range of libraries to tackle problems that can be handled in the base language. I fear that very little is gained by this. Stackexchange and similar sites can be good tools for those with experience, but they are ruinous for students who are just starting out.

When in doubt, read the documentation.

severak_cz 4 years ago |

My first serious project was kind of bulletin board system/internal e-mail written in Qbasic (when I was something like 10 years old). It was used by my siblings on our shared computer.

It stored data in CSV file and when someone entered "," in the message, it was broken and I needed to fix datafile manually. :-D

scrapheap 4 years ago | |

> It stored data in CSV file and when someone entered "," in the message, it was broken and I needed to fix datafile manually. :-D

So it was Enterprise Software then :)