Personally, I started off with Roblox back in the early 2010s, and taught myself Lua. I really liked those Tycoon games, and wanted to see how they worked.
I eventually found Minecraft (like every kid back in the day did), and learnt Java to make Bukkit server mods.
Around 2016 I thought websites were kinda cool, so I started learning HTML, CSS, and JS, and I’ve been in the web dev space ever since.
What about the rest of y’all? What’s your personal programming path?
It was 1981. I wanted an Atari 2600. My father bought be an Atari 400 instead. It didn’t have the extensive game library but it did have better graphics, and you could write programs on it (Atari Basic). There were monthly magazines with programs you had to type in yourself (no floppy disks yet, just cassette storage). It was pretty easy to learn how things worked as you went, and some other reference books with additional details for new-to-me processes.
I’m still new to the space, though I’ve been dabbling for years now. I don’t really have a handle on any language yet. I feel like I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concepts fully and haven’t really done any real projects other than a simple Python program that was about 100 lines of code. I’ve dabbled in Java and HTML/CSS here and there as well.
Between life’s challenges with my own health and my family’s as well it’s tough to find time to learn. But I’m still endlessly fascinated.
Being able to actually develop the skill and become good enough at a language to get a job in the industry would probably be great for my family’s situation but it’s just so hard to get to that point.
I’m hopeful one day things will line up and I can finally call myself a programmer.
TI-83 graphing calculator in high school, around 1998. I would sit there in math class coding games in Basic. Ended up developing a reputation as the guy you went to if you needed a program to cheat on a math test.
The highlight of the entire endeavor was a class wherein the teacher announced that before a test, they’d be resetting the memory on everyone’s graphing calculators, to prevent cheating. I wasn’t planning to cheat, but I did have a few games I was working on, and I didn’t want to lose them, so I wrote a program that emulated the graphing calculator’s interface, and would let you go through all of the steps to reset the memory, including showing the Programs menu as being empty afterwards, while not actually resetting anything.
I showed this to the teacher just before the test (demonstrated “resetting the memory” with the program running, then demonstrated that the memory was in fact not reset), and he backed off from the compulsory reset policy in favor of the honor system, because he conceded that he wouldn’t be able to verify that the memory was actually reset anyway. Made me feel like an absolute hero.
It’s honestly funny because I learned the concepts in the math classes a lot better as a result of this - it took a very thorough understanding of how to use a concept to write a program to solve it for you.
It’s honestly funny because I learned the concepts in the math classes a lot better as a result of this - it took a very thorough understanding of how to use a concept to write a program to solve it for you.
My experience almost exactly. I built the interest by making/hacking TI-83 games, then made math class programs which i never really used because i had learned the material. It was fun, eye opening, and paved a path to my career!
Before college, the only exposure I had was some basic HTML and CSS in high school because I wanted to customize my MySpace and LiveJournal (am I dating myself here? haha). Then I had one class my freshman year of college that involved some C++ programming, which was my first time actually writing a full program. Halfway through college, I wanted to change my major, and I ended up switching to CS since a few of my friends were doing that, and it turned out I liked it well enough.
Back then, when you wanted some new games you could:
- buy them (over expensive)
- trade some on cassette tapes at the schoolyard
- Go to the library, grab some source code books, have fun programming them
Wrote my own text-adventure when I was 10, since then I came across Basic, Turbo Pascal, JS, Java, AS, Lua, Python, C++, maybe some more 😵💫
Growing up in the 90s, I watched my father work with computers in the US Air Force. In 2001 he gave my brothers and I an HTML book and stated that “With this and Notepad you can write your own websites”. We proceeded to tear that book apart and each of us had a web site on our Windows 98 SE computers that were networked together and thus had our sites linked together. Nothing spectacular but it was fun.
I wish now that I had spent more time on the javascript side of the book as I am still pretty weak with JS.
My father bought a Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80. I was mesmerized by it. I created basic programs on it.
Then we eventually got a 486DX2 IBM Compatible and I programmed little fantasy adventures.
Those actually built up so that when I was in high school and had a math test I realized my TI-82 was similiar to what I knew and I was able to program my calculator with all of the math equations to spit out the answers for me. This had approvals from my teacher.
I never became a developer, but I still enjoy looking at code and investigating it.
Going from a TRS-80 to a 486 must’ve been like going from a tricycle to a starship.
Yeah the TRS-80 was an oddity that barely worked. The 486 really got me into computing and just loved all of it.
The 486 was remarkable in that it packed a lot of features onto a single chip, including privilege levels, memory protection, virtual memory, floating-point arithmetic, and a 32-bit address space. These were once features you’d only find in a big-iron machine from IBM or DEC. Even when they did become available in smaller computers, like the Motorola 68000 series, they still tended to require additional chips to implement them, like the Motorola 68851 memory management unit and 68881 floating-point unit. The 486 had all that stuff built in. Motorola was behind, but not by much: they matched the 486’s features a year later with the 68040.
Intel wasn’t always neck-and-neck Motorola, though. When the 68000 was released in 1979, it was even more revolutionary: it was one of the first 32-bit microprocessors, and very fast for its day. IBM engineers wanted to use that for the IBM PC, but if I recall correctly, management wanted Intel instead because they already had a deal, so they went with the more primitive, 16/20-bit Intel 8088 instead.
And that’s a shame. Had they used the 68000, PC DOS would have been 32-bit from the start, and the infamous 640kB limit would never have existed.
I started by making myself a small personal website in the early 2000s, and introducing iframes because I was tired of copy-pasting the same navbar into each page. That led me to PHP to achieve the same thing with includes, and then the snowball effect started.
After more amateur and self-taught website work before uni, I then started a CS degree and was taught how to program for the first time: starting with Java, some Haskell, some C and more than enough perl.
The working world came knocking and I expanded my repertoire to include Python and any other language of the day.
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BASIC and eventually Z-80 asm on the Sinclair ZX-81. I didn’t have an assembler so I had to translate the instructions on paper and
POKEthem in by hand. I managed to write a screen scrolling routine this way.RAND USR 16514and all that.Some other Z-80 micros after that and then PCs and jumped on the Linux train pretty early on, been riding that since.
It’s a silly reason for my case. When I was like 11, I watched so many hacker movies and was like “damn this is cool, I want to be like them” so I dug through the path of “how to become a hacker” and saw that I need to know the program before trying to hack it. Tried learning C but failed because my monkey brain can’t handle all that. So I ended up writing random bash and python scripts since that time.
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I was forced to learn HTML as a 9-year-old so I could make sick Pet Pages on Neopets and show off to all my Neofriends.
<embed src=“GhostBusters.mid” autostart=“true”>
I started when I was 7 on an old Amstrad CPC464, together with a book teaching you BASIC. I mainly copy/pasted programs from the book until I learned some basics. It’s been programmer’s life ever since.
What a trajectory your life can take from one simple child’s enjoyment.
Minecraft plugins, a very fun way to learn Java
