OpenLoop

Qbasic, started when I was ~10. By age 12 I had written my first game, a top view boxing clone (nothing fancy) with scoring and whatnot. Fast forward 6 years later I started college and learned C and C++ and picked up C# on my own. Now, I work in the financial industry using COBOL and assembly .

dr.p

17 with VB, C++ and JavaScript. That was 11 years ago. I plan on finally going to college and getting a degree this year.

__________________
Neeley.org

hollystyles

Started with BASIC aged 10 thru to about 15. I then found out about girls and mountains and forgot all about programming until about age 25 when I got involved again with VBA in MS Access97 and TSQL in Sql Server 6.5, Then VBScript and Javascript in ASP pages. Now doing mostly C# in Windows forms and ASP.NET. At home I do whatever seems interesting: Assembly, Common Lisp, C, C++, Java, PHP ...

so there's a huge gap in there when I missed a lot. I'm catching up though. Well... I hope I am

Grich

I've noticed alot of people start with BASIC. Nothing wrong with it, I just find that interesting.

__________________
SYNTAX ERROR ...

hollystyles

Well we are the basic generation, it was designed to inspire us and comoditise us so we'd end up flooding the market with cheap free software so that everyone would want to buy computers. and in my opinion it's worked rather well.

__________________
==========================================
Web junky, fevered monkey

Mad_guy

I started when I was roughly 12, with PHP and a little C. I moved to perl for a while afterwords, and god only knows how I went through game development, win32 and am now at home with functional programming. :]

So February will make it about 6 years.

__________________
os: mac os 10.5.4
revision control: git
editor: emacs

site

Ancient Dragon

I was 37 when I first started programming. My God when I was 12 we didn't even have indoor plumbing and PCs hadn't been invented yet, neither had color TV (well yes it had been invented but we didn't have it in our area yet). Also had a crank telephone. If you ever watch an old Lassie TV rerun you will see them use crank phones -- that's what we had.

Attached Images

crank phone.jpg (14.1 KB, 7 views)

Kaiouss

That's a difficult question because there's a difference between programming and computer programming. The world has all sorts of programming and whether it was trying to understand a process, teaching it to someone else, or learning C++, I can't really think of a time when I wasn't programming. Kind of fun to think about how the whole world can be broken down into pseudocode.

I learned C++ at 15, basic html at 16, and now I'm back at it with C# at 20. I think that old text/command-line GUIs are worth mentioning because learning MS-DOS and Cisco in High School were both kind of like learning to program. But the Unix command line, now that I'm trying it out for the first time, eludes me.

Hello all, by the by. We don't know one another and, given my attention span, I can't give guarantees on whether we will in the future.

PS. Don't worry, I'm not here to off-load my homework on anyone (that's what compilers are for)

__________________
Think of it this way: If I'm a programmer and you're an end-user, that drink is an error on a Windows Winsock API.

Are you listening now or should I try to establish a connection to your data socket later?

bharris

My story is pretty much the same. I started at 9 on the Commodore 64 and then on to Apple Basic and QBasic. Graphics programs and games were my big thing. I kept at it until about 16. Found out about girls and go a social life in high school. I got married at 25 and went back to school by age 26 for a degree in CS. That's when I got back into it with C++, Visual Basic, T-SQL. Picked up HTML, Javascript, VBScript, Python, and ASP along the way. Currently 32 years old working as a web application developer using ASP.NET and C#.

Arla

Without reference to the age of people responding it's impossible to derive anything from it.

Myself, at least, it was either program in basic, or don't program, C didn't exist, IBM PC's were far too expensive for home computer use so really you brought a Spectrum or an Atari or Apple and you wrote basic programs.