At What Age did you start programming?

What age did you start programming?

  • 1-10

    Votes: 11 11.2%

  • 10-15

    Votes: 41 41.8%

  • 15-20

    Votes: 24 24.5%

  • 20-25

    Votes: 16 16.3%

  • 25-30

    Votes: 4 4.1%

  • 30-35

    Votes: 1 1.0%

  • 40-45

    Votes: 1 1.0%

  • 45+

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    98
I just voted and saw the results, impressive.

I was about 11 when I first began. Back in the days of TRS80's that used those large floppy disks and printed on paper that was supplied in large rolls.

I'm the oldest of four kids and my youngest family members tease me about being ancient and having used 'ancient scrolls' as they loving refer to those paper supply rolls the TRS80's used.

VB.NET is actually my first MS language to use. I've been in the Unix and AIX world most of the time using varying scripting languages and other 4GL databases that predate the advent of SQL.

I think learning more than one language is a good thing. I presently have a website that is done in PHP. Once I get good enough with VB.NET and the .NET family I hope to also have a .NET website.

Thanks to everyone here. I enjoy learning and also helping others learn.
 
VolteFace said:
When I was seven I started VB, and when I was 13 I really got into it (and www.visualbasicforum.com). When I was 14 I started to learn .NET, and now I'm 15 and still learning.
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Holy mackerel! You're young enough to be one of dynamic sysop's kids! Kidding.

I was 11 when my parents relented to my begging and got me a Commodore Vic 20. (The '20' stood for the 20 K (yes, K) of RAM that it had). Started by writing goofy basic programs on that. I actually got into it for real writing LotusScript for a long-forgotten thing called Lotus Components (kind of a precursor to ActiveX, in a way). Ever since, I've been using way too many parentheses in my everyday writing.
 
I was 8 or 9 when I started programming with some kind of BASIC on a two-color 5-inch display.
Some time later I got my first PC and went on with BASICA GWBASIC and Pascal/Turbo Pascal.
For about 5 or 6 years everything went fine for me (mostly because there were other rhings, more interestingthan prgraming) and then I restarted Programming with Clipper. Afterwards I made my way through different Versions of Visual Objects and about 1.5 years ago I found my way back to VB or better vb.net.
:p
Due to some circumstances, today I'm programming with ASP.net and I#m really missing my .net-Framework-IDE with all the little hints and tricks as my company is not willing to buy the package - too expensive they say
:(
So, I have to work with my good old notepad, again -> BACK TO THE ROOTS!!!
 
I started programming 6 months ago (I just turned 14).

I can program fairly fluently, VB 6, VB .NET and C++ (managed and unmanaged) I can also use DirectX 7, 8, 9 and I've learned most of the .NET API
 
First ever Program:
PI - Calculation at school. BASIC. 14 yrs old.

First ever programm designed and implemented all on my own:
Soccer League Simulation. ZX-81. BASIC. 16 yrs old.

First ever professional implementation:
Medical Imaging Components. PDP-11. FORTRAN. 20 yrs old.

Jeez.
I've been programming for more than half of my life.
 
Well i started writing batch programs when i was around 14, moving on to VB3 when i was about 17 for a few lunch times at school. From 18 - 22 i worked with loads of programming languages at uni, but mastered none. I wrote my first VB6 ping pong game at 21, done my final uni project in VB5, rewrote my ping pong game at 23. Now still 23 i have moved on to VB.NET, but due to other commitments i havent managed to do much for several months now.

7 is far too young to be programming. I would want my kids (if i had any) programming until they was about 14.
 
True, 7 is somewhat young. I'd love to have started learning programming that young...but i don't think people develop higher level abstract thinking until later on...14 or 15.
 
i think it was on a commodore wen i was like 8 or 9

my parents didn't push me n i lost interest
i started to get interest in programming like 10 years later.....
 
I started when I was 11, and since then I continued, I started on C, but gor bored of this and started developing on Basic (yeah basic), then windows came, Visual Basic, C++... and now .NET, but I'm really thinking on learning a new language like Eiffel or something like that. C# was sooooooo easy.

I find something that doesn't make any sense, quoted below

The only reason kids get it easy is because they are more eager and excited to do the things than adults.
Click to expand...

No kiddo, you're wrong, you kids have it so easy due the new technologies, I remember when I started developing, that I had to paint every pixel of what I wanted, now you got Visual Forms, try developing an app without using any Visual tool, like someone said, using notepad.

So have fun coding... if coding becomes a routine better start working as a butcher or a cab driver, will be more fun
 
I marked the poll as 25-30, when I started to program Access with VBA, moving away from point and click.

When I was in the navy (20 years old) I was trained to program the UCQ 20. It was a box 2 foot by 2 foot box with a 64K Hard drive (this included the ram and was half of the total size of the computer and weighted about 100pounds). The system was a dual processor (2 UCQ20's) and all the peripherals filled an entire room. The peripheral data connectors that interconnected everything where 150pin monsters. The UCQ 20 had to be programmed in machine language. So I had to know the Jump command, push data to p register, and all that. It was eight bit (octal) and the program was entered directly into the Memory address via a light panel. So if I wanted to jump I would have to enter the hard drive mem address, then the code for a jump command, then the next hard drive mem location would be the data ie: Part1, 10010101, Part2, 00101010. If I wanted to save programs I would have to print it out to a Paper Tape Reader, which was a thin strip of paper with Holes in it read by a light sensor. If you wanted the tape to last you would get it right in memory then punch it out as a Master using Mylar Tape. It gives me headache now thinking about all that, but, as a result I can think in Hex and Octal pretty much subconsciously.

MTS
 
Kids have it easier these days because the technology is cheap and readily available.

I had to combine a years worth of Saturday job, paper round, birthday and christmas presents to get my first computer (Spectrum 48k). I started programming on that aged about 12 I guess, I didn't do much with it though, other than get the Currah U Speech unit to say naughty words...

Those were the days...
 
I started on a BBC Microcomputer at school too (~14yrs old... wow that was 12 years ago...), but with basic. I remember writing my first D&D game, riddled with Goto's... But I guess offically I didn't start until Pascal and C at university.
 
BBC Microcomputers.... those were the days. I was 13 when I started on one of these and I never looked back. I spent countless hours designing and programming animated sprites that would bounce around the screen.

At the same time, I had a Commodore Vic-20 with which I wrote my first game.
 
14 for me

I started pretty recently, only about 6 months on VB6 just started (this week infact) VB.NET, played with some VC++ but nothing more then source code off websites and some added stuff, i have always been good at making scripts in mIRC (best chatting client) and make .bat files stuff like that , just recently thugh getting serious, so i would say i started when i was 14
(im 15 now)
:p

Andrew
 
Ok... didn't make it in time to take the poll. But I started at the age of 12 on a TI-99/4A using basic. I wrote my first game (Nerm's Revenge) which was a sequel to a "Snake" type of game. (Eat the mushrooms and your tail gets longer... avoid running into your tail or the wall). My parents were nice enough to get me a subscription to "Compute!" magazine and I spent hours typing in the programs in them and analyzing them.

The next year I took my first computer course in Jr. High using a TRS-80 Model 3 (with 5 1/2 inch floppies). I later in herited 2 of these amazing machines from my church when then upgraded and sequestered myself in my room for days on end teaching myself assembly. I wrote and editor/assembler and a disassembler in BASIC on this machine as well as a drawing program that would save pictures and then compile them to an executable for viewing without a viewing program. Afterwards I got started on an ambitious project to make a Dungeons and Dragons RPG for the City of Greyhawk.... this fell flat since the computers finally bit the dust and I had no money to repair them. (I still have my disks though and have tinkered with them from time to time using emulators)

I didn't discover the PC world until about the age of 26. I started working with VB3 and later upgraded to VB5. I finally got a job at a software company as a QA tester when I was 29 where I used VB6 to write some in-house utilities and fooled around in my spare time with DirectX 7. I also tinkered with VC++ but didn't get far with it since most of my programs needed to be developed quickly and only in my spare time. Most of my programming then was simple stuff and I didn't start getting really serious till the past several years. I am 34 now and have been using VB.NET for over a year. I have again tinkered with C# and am toying with the idea of moving to it permanently. I am about to finish a major component that will be available to make creating a plugin enabled application even easier than it already is in .NET.
 
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