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
To my own opinion, start programming in a younger time doesn't mean that you will be good. Anyway, it will help in getting to know all those programming theories earlier.

To me, as long as your programming foundation is strong, you are able to write any programs as you like as you wish.

It is nothing to do with age. Bare in mind that all those programming languages creators (programmers in JAVA, Microsoft, Borland and so on..). Not all of them were started program in very young time. Not much people could afford to buy COMPUTERs on 20 years ago. But, they have created those programming languages/environments for US.

So, how to classifiy a good programmer? I had read an article before saying:

good programming experience is equals to

10 years of programming with 1 hour a day
or
1 year of programming with 10 hours a day.

How do you think???
 
My Starting Age

I honestly started programming in BASIC when I was about 7 or 8, and went on to make modifications to the old Nibble game when I was 10. After that, I really just toyed around a little bit until I got into high school, where I went on to start programming in C++, and did a little bit of COBOL and ForTran in class.

I'm 19 now, and I have been programming in VB.NET for about 8 months now, and although I'm still learning, am starting to get into DirectX programming..or trying to.
 
Do you guys have any ideas on defining a good developer? I think we could bring this into discussion.

My own thought are
How fast you can finish a project.
How well you could design a databases.
How quality is your code/How welll the codes are presented
How free bug is your system
How well modulated
How less coupled
How well cohesived

I think this topic could be better than telling people when did you start programming. Is not it?

If you could write a GOOD system with only one year's programming experience, u might be better compare to those whose could write the same output with ten years experience.

So, guys.. let's cocky on how well are ur programming skills but not when did you start.
 
I started 8 years old. 6 years VB 6.0 and HTML combined. HTML went quite nice. VB.. eh.. made a helicopter game using image control :p nothing more...
Had a VB break for 1 year, started with PHP, Made som nice scripts: LinkManager, Forums, And now im working on a CMS. Learned css. and as 15 i went back to vb trying to make some nice DX apps..

--Loffen
 
Started at 19, did half an year VB6 by myself, but I didn't quite get it, so I stopped. Started again at 21 with .NET and I got it :) I'm 22 now
 
I missed the poll by a long shot, but just for grins, I wrote a qBASIC program with my dad when I was seven years old, to calculate how old you were in years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds.
 
I started at 11 on a ZX-Spectrum 48k+.

My first ever program was the classic 'guess the number' in 1989, next year I made a text adventure game and a NBA data base of 1990.

After this I got my Amiga 500 in 1993 where I put aside coding and learned the great feeling of REAL multitasking OS AmigaOS and 2D painting. Then I got my Amiga 1200; I convert it to a A1200Tower later on with a PPC603e 210MHZ + with Fast SCSI and a 060 at 50mhz. I used Amiga until 2001 (then I put amiga aside and became comun mortal PC user). Damn! Amiga had the best Email program (YAM) and IRC client (AmIRC) till they were ported to Linux :D. NOTE: Amirc IRC Client still kicks the **** out of PC Mirc in plain 2005...

Anyway, I was forced to resume coding for professional reasons on December of 2003 with VB6 and moved to .NET in August 2004. Now I'm coding for both professional and personal pleasure :)

Since December of 2003 that I code about 8 hours/day including weekends... There were times where I would start coding Startday morning at 09:00 and stoping only at 02:00 in the next day... But only a few times since this is somewhat EXAUSTING!
 
Last edited:
Just for kicks I'll toss my info in:

I started when I was 13-14 back in the days when most of you guys (it seems) where in diapers or not even born. :) I was using an AppleII and picked up a Commodore 64 where I started playing with animating sprites (anyone remember Peek and Poke?). I've done COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C/C++, several versions of BASIC and pretty much do strictly VB.NET for work and VB.NET/C# for play. If I manage to get back into the game industry I'll be back to doing C++ (unless I can convince management to do something in C# :) ).
 
Machaira said:
Just for kicks I'll toss my info in:

I started when I was 13-14 back in the days when most of you guys (it seems) where in diapers or not even born. :) I was using an AppleII and picked up a Commodore 64 where I started playing with animating sprites (anyone remember Peek and Poke?). I've done COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C/C++, several versions of BASIC and pretty much do strictly VB.NET for work and VB.NET/C# for play. If I manage to get back into the game industry I'll be back to doing C++ (unless I can convince management to do something in C# :) ).
Click to expand...

Well, I would like to convince you, unfortunately you always end up exiting Messenger as soon I start chating with u or getting no response even if you don't quit messenger at all...
 
That might not be me, as my 5 year old son tends to use the PC a lot (and my wife is on every once in a while and just closes stuff she doesn't understand). I rarely use Messenger.
 
Well I started when I was about 21 with VB script to proform Admin Tasks then moved on up to VB6 and now VB.net 2003. Most of my knowledge is book based and backing up with course a year or so after started programming.
 
wow, I'm amazed at the lack of people in a situation similar to my own. I started programming in college. Liked math and needed some filler courses to take and programming looked interesting (and a way to get employed). Interesting turned into a second major.

My school taught in c++ so thats what I did. Some PROLOG for AI stuff and a little LISP for flavor but the vast majority of it was c++. Talk about a rough intro to programming. After the fact I'm kinda happy that they did it that way. After so much time in c++ everything else seems like cake. (well, aside from the class that we had to do assembly in, that blew)
 
wow, I'm amazed at the lack of people in a situation similar to my own.
Click to expand...

Actually Bob, given this environment you are correct. But take a look out in the real world and you'll find you are in the majority. Most of the CS students at my college are taking the major either for it's monetary benefits or because they like playing computer games. Funny enough, the dropout rate for CS at my school is higher than any other major, and most that fail CS move into a telecommunications major.
 
Diesel said:
Funny enough, the dropout rate for CS at my school is higher than any other major...
Click to expand...

That doesnt surprise me in the least. CS is hard. No offense to anyone in business school but from what I've seen of it, business classes aren't. Admittedly, physics, chemistry and the like can be hard too but learning CS has an extra layer of "hardness" I think.

There is the problem that everyone in the sciences face: figuring out how to get a solution to your problem. But CS has the added "feature" of learning syntax too. Its not hard for me to imagine quitting CS (I considered it many times) especially at 4 in the morning when you discover that the bug youve been trying to figure out for the last 2 hours is actually a misplaced ;. Luckily (I guess) the really hard stuff came once I was too far along to stop.

The good side is those errors only happen once (ok, maybe twice ;) )
 
Back
Top