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Florin Pop
Florin Pop

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How old were you when you wrote your first line of code?

And maybe tell us what you wrote? πŸ˜ƒ

I started at around 15-16 in High School and if I remember correctly it was a little bit of HTML that we wrote 😊

Top comments (78)

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Robert Sweetman

I was 44. Three years later I'm learning Javascript and Rust.

Started by adding Powershell Write-Host statements to the QA automation so when it barfed we'd at least have a clue as to which part of the script(s) to fix.

Then progressed to automating virtual machine setups using Powershell, Terraform, Ansible and the various cloud CLI's.

If anyone's reading these replies and thinking "everyone answering was in their teens when they started, I'm screwed" take heart. I thought only super intelligent people with some sort of special gift for maths could be programmers... I did an art degree ;)

Turns out it's like everything else. Be genuinely interested in the topic, have a need to get something done and PRACTICE.

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Jonathan Kuhl

14-15. It was a language called C-Script. C-Script was a scripting language built for A4 3d GameStudio made by some German company. I tried to make video games back in the day and realized how much of a chore that really is.

C-Script later got replaced by Lite-C, a super set or maybe a library (not sure how exactly it worked) of C++. Lite-C you could write any valid C++ as well as Gamestudio's own library of code (so maybe it was a superset like Typescript is to JavaScript, I don't remember.)

Haven't touched it in years though. I have Unity and I know C# but I haven't gotten back into game dev, simply because I remember how much work it was.

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Antonio Radovcic

QBasic at 11 or 12 I guess.
I started by modifying Textadventures and did all kinds of BEEP-stuff with the piezo-speaker. The most "complex" thing I started was what today is called a "Rougelike". I could control a figure and it even had a second room :-3

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Alex Friedman

12 QBasic. I wrote a program that would randomly draw lines of varying sizes and colors on screen. I also remember combing through the source code to the Gorillas game and just copying and pasting various snippets to try and figure out what they do. Fast forward 25 years, and I still find myself copying and pasting various snippets of code to try and figure out what they do πŸ˜†

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Antonio Radovcic

Hehe did you also at some point just draw random points on the screen and discovered that it’s not really random?

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lucsan

🐣 12 years old on a Z80 using assembly, we would identify the error message buffers and insert rude words.

We had to load the OS every time from a cassette tape (a last century method of transporting sound information)

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Thomas H Jones II

Good times. I learnt 6502 assembler because programs I'd write for my Apple ][ were too stupidly slow in pretty much any other higher-level language.

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Brad

I was in middle school programming what I thought was the only way.

using batch files, GOTOS, help, and pure trial and error on windows xp

  • I didn't have access to the internet, or know what I would even search for on ask.com
  • I didn't know what "programming" was. I thought I was doing hacking 😎
  • I spent a full week figuring out the correct syntax to get user input
  • I tried every single command available to CMD and read every single help output for each command.

I ended up making a simple math games, random scripts that made it look like I was actually hacking (fake blue screens of deaths), changing the CMD thru rainbox colors, play Star wars thru telnet, etc.

It wasn't until college I realized I had no idea what I was doing at the time πŸ˜„ but the experience did give me a good idea that I'd go into "Computer Science" when I got older haha

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Florin Pop

Wow! This is a very interesting story! #MrRobot 😁

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Corey McCormick

I believe I was around 9 or 10 when I discovered Microsoft Front Page on a Windows 95 machine. One of my first projects was just a simple HTML website that linked a bunch of search engine and gaming sites together.

O how I wish I had a copy of the small projects I made. Would be fun to compare and look at now.

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Florin Pop

Yup, it really would be fun!! ☺️

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Vicente G. Reyes • Edited

I was 17 or 18 and was in college. First language was Turbo C(2008); then I forgot everything. Fast forward to today, first program I wrote was a Twitter Bot in Python.

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Florin Pop

What does the Twitter Bot do? πŸ˜ƒ

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Vicente G. Reyes

It tweets jokes from the icanhazdadjoke api hahaha

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Luigui Moreno

23, sure I had written code before to courses in college, but when I start programming for the sake of programming I was 23 YO, I remember the I started reading a "For Dummies" book about css, html and javascript, that also happens to have php included great book at the time by Andy Harris

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Saul Costa

8 or 9.

I'd wanted video games to play, but my parents were pretty strict, so instead of letting me get e.g. Age of Empires, my dad handed me a floppy disk with a bunch of QBASIC games on it and told me "if you want to play video games so badly, build your own".

I spent a lot of time reverse engineering the games, which back then was easier IMO since the source code was immediately available when you started the game. Then I started by modifying the existing games, then slowly building my own (mostly text based) games.

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Toby Worth • Edited

I was 10. I was coding a game from a book on the ZX81. I had to use a 16Kb RAM pack to allow me to write all teh codez. I think it was about 2 or 3Kb in total, but the base RAM was 1Kb or something. Anyway, it took me about 4 hours. The keyboard was soo finnicky, it was mostly debugging... XD

All it did was create a 'valley' of spaced 'I' characters that descended down the screen towards your avatar (an 'H') and you had to steer left and right to get further up the valley as it narrowed every 10 steps or so. There were millions of these games, but it all boiled down to this basic dynamic.

It ran like an LCD word processor, but it was my first game! Unfortunately, since there was no tape backup, that night I lost it all because the RAM pack had to be returned to the owner. 'Death Valley 3000' was early vapourware! :D

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ZumDeWald

I was 15 and in high school. I had a few friends exploring HTML and learned the basics of turning a txt file into a website. However, I fell off the wagon when they got into JavaScript and CSS!

Glad to have found my way back to it all these years later.

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Nucu Labs

When I wrote my first line of code I was around 12 years old, I was using a Sony Ericsson k300i mobile phone and I copied some Javascript from some Webmaster's page on paper and then transcribed it to my website which was built using a platform that gave you a subdomain and let you html and Javascript. The Javascript greeted the user by displaying an alert taking into account the current time of the day.

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Thomas H Jones II

Six or seven ...now forty-plus years ago. I was interested in computer graphics. However, in the late 70s, doing graphics meant learning how to bang-out machine-code. Even then, the results suuuuuuuuucked.

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Florin Pop

Heh!

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Omar Sinan

Lua at 11-12 years old. I used to develop games on a game platform called Roblox. Started off by making an RPG game called β€œLegend of the Fire Swords”. Kept creating games up until i was around 16-17 and then moved on to app development with Swift :D