Fresh (programming) blood December 4, 2010
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, poll.Tags: computer, programming
trackback
For those of you who spend any amount of time programming, I have three questions. Please leave a response with your answer in the comments.
1 – What age were you when you first started programming?
2 – What caused you to learn to program?
3 – What was the first language you learned to program in? (I am fine if this language is visual, such as LabView. I’m looking for an ability to give a computer a sequential set of commands.)
I’ll probably write a follow up to this, but I am extremely curious.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
1. 15 years old
2. The class sounded interesting.
3. QBASIC
1. 21
2. It was for a computational ecology course
3. Python
1. 11 years old (give or take a year)
2. Someone forced me to at summer camp.
3. Turtle graphics portion of Logo. It’s a miracle I still remember the experience.
I learned when I was 9 y/o to program in BASIC on a TRS-80. I thought it was like magic, and I got my parents to send me to a computer summer class, also in BASIC. GOTOs were encouraged, probably b/c they thought it was good just to have kids doing anything with a computer. I went to another BASIC the following summer and then to one in Pascal.
Probably because I had started on BASIC, though, I was never that good at software design / programming, so I do mostly hardware today.
I taught myself programming on a VIC-20 I bought myself when I was about 15 (I couldn’t afford a C64). I was intensely curious about computers and the idea that I could have one of my own blew my mind.
My first programs were written in Commodore BASIC (ugh), but by the time I entered college I had started fiddling with assembly, so picking up FORTRAN (more ugh), Pascal, and assembly on the M68000 was pretty easy.
Rebecca at Adventures in Applied Math was just talking about her first programming and bringing back my tender memories of youth.
1- 7 or 8
2- we had a book, sounded fun I guess, computers were slow so this and word processing were the quickest things you could do on them
3- QBASIC
It’s something I don’t think I’m as good at as I want to be these days so I wonder if Charles doesn’t have a point in BASIC being a bad language to start with.
1. 16, I think.
2. I wanted to learn how to write programs for my graphing calculator. We were allowed to use any programs we wrote on our calculators for exams and it seemed like an easy way to minimize what I needed to memorize.
3. I believe the graphing calculator language is BASIC, or a simplified version.
I learned some LPC so I could create quests in a MUD I used to play; and I also learned CSS so I could create websites faster.
I did that for my Algebra 2 exam and found out too late that I could *not* use my calculator. It did not go well.
1 – 8 years old.
2 – My dad bought me an Amstrad 464+ and I was intrigued about the simple “>” prompt before loading up Burning Rubber.
3 – The CPC version of Basic, before quickly moving on to QBasic and upwards.