When did you get into computer programming?

[nerdpowah23]

For me, I started nearly two years ago, I started with HTML and Javascript (When I was 13). Untill about a year ago I started learning PHP and MySQL, I'm still learning, but I feel like I have a very good grasp on the two.

[essellar]

Just remember that you're never finished learning. I started at about the same age as you did, but for me that was back around 1974. Programming for a young fellow then meant lerning enough about a language like Fortran to write and "step through" program listings, then if you thought you had something worth running (and you were lucky enough to have access, as I did through my school), commit your program to punch cards (actually, at that time, Electrographic cards you filled in with a pencil) and sent them off to be processed in an overnight batch somewhere (usually at the local university's mainframe or "mini" computer) and wait a week or two to get a printout back.

The computing world has changed a lot since then, but even though on the surface things have looked pretty stable for the past few years, I'm amazed at the pace at which things keep changing. There's no way I'll ever know it all. If I ever find myself thinking that I do, I'll know that there's something wrong with my imagination, my curiousity, or both.

[carl6969]

Eseller - I could copy your post word for word and apply it as my own experience. Brings back interesting memories.

- Carl

[Darkmere]

I first started programming computers when I was around 9 years old with a TRS-80 which was 1989 I got into more advanced programming when I was 13

[khopcraft77]

...Wait HTML counts?

11

Otherwise, 14 with C#.

[essellar]

Sure -- why not? HTML is a declarative language describing a document to be displayed.

Even if we aren't counting HTML, the OP mentioned JavaScript, which is an imperative/functional hybrid, Turing-complete programming language by any reasonable definition of the term. Don't confuse JavaScript with its DOM bindings in the browser; there are implementations with complete system bindings as well. Think of it as a Lisp dialect with a C-style syntax. Rhino is a JS implementation on the Java Virtual Machine; IBM Lotus Domino uses JS on its version of JSF (xPages); Apache CouchDB uses JSON as a store and JS (particularly a JS implementation of map() and reduce()) to build indexes and queries; Node.js is a JS-based web server -- the list goes on and on.

[Eugen Jung]

What kind of programming are we talking about? Something specific, or just programming in general? Anyway, here's my programming history:

Web programming...
I know a bit about PHP, but that's about it. I learnt PHP mainly to make managing my site easier. I don't do much web development. It just seems like a weak platform to me. WebGL might change that, but until then I prefer to focus on good old executables.

Application programming...
I've used C# and the .NET Framework, as well as C++ and both wxWidgets and the Qt Framework (which I prefer). I'm pretty much self-taught in this area of programming (the .NET Framework is really intuitive, and Qt is pretty similar once you get the hang of it).

Game programming...
I started out with XNA, then - after I learnt C++ - DirectX and the NVidia PhysX physics engine. When I switched to Linux, I ditched DirectX in favour of OpenGL, although I continued to use PhysX. After a while I decided to switch to Bullet Physics instead, because of NVidia's restrictive licensing.

Eventually, I decided that although using low-level OpenGL functions gave me a lot of control, I was wasting valuable development time just getting things to work. I decided to switch to a proper high-level graphics engine. Since speed was important to me, and since the project was open-source (also quite important to me), I decided to go with the Irrlicht Engine.

Learning to program...
Truthfully, I never went to university. I learnt programming by reading - books, documentation, articles, tutorials, sample code and open-source code, etc. For example, when I first started working on a multiplayer game, Brian Hall's Guide to Network Programming was invaluable.

I can't really remember when I became interested in programming. I started out with BASIC (which I do not recommend), then learnt C. After some time using C, I learnt C++. I learnt Visual C# a few years ago, and have since also used Mono. Recently, I've also been dabbling in Python, although C++ is still my language of choice.

[nerdpowah23]

I'm actually working on a text-based MMORPG as of this moment, don't know if I'll finish it or not. Just a summer project, I guess. It's nice to know I'm not the only 16 year old out there REALLY interested in this kind of stuff.

[adam.k]

I started programming in about grade 8, so somewhere around 13, that was mostly web programming. Then in high school I took a computer science course, learned visual basic. That summer I got a book and started learning Java. Now I program mostly in Objective-C, C++, and some PHP/HTML and Javascript. Trying to learn Ruby at the moment

[barathdon3058]

I started learning HTML at 12.

Then, at 15, I started learning C and C++

At the moment, I'm trying to solve some problems in a website using C and C++