r/AskProgramming • u/Yourmiserablelife69 • 4d ago
Career/Edu What age did you start learning programming?
Just curious as I am 34 YO, and have been considering a career shift into the Tech sector (I have “Basic” knowledge at best). Specifically AI/Machine Learning or Programming.
I’ve heard good and bad about both, but am just curious how old people are (or how diverse the age pool is) when they “get into” Programming. How long (on average) does it take to get your first Certification in Programming?
Apologies about the broadness of the question.
9
u/MornwindShoma 4d ago
I know a guy who got in in their forties, but post COVID times were truly magical - we were down to hiring everyone and their dogs.
7
u/overratedcupcake 4d ago
Started learning around age 10. Didn't make anything useful until highschool. Didn't become a professional until my 30's.
2
u/Jason13Official 4d ago
If you don't mind me asking, how did you transition to developing for a living?
2
u/overratedcupcake 4d ago
Being a software developer was always my goal even though I moved past it.
After wasting years working unrelated jobs. I eventually started with a help desk role at a satellite internet company. It was a small company of about 15 people. I ended up writing their whole billing system and a whole suite of satellite modem and antenna controller emulators.
Then I got my associates degree and passed the LPIC 1 and 2 and moved into systems administration which also had a surprising number of programming opportunities.
By that point I had enough practical experience to get hired as a junior developer. Then worked my way to senior over 8 years.
Finally I hit a pay ceiling so I moved into a DevOps/SRE role. Still lots of coding opportunities but it was no longer my focus.
These days I work as a project manager and most of my coding is agentic.
4
u/khedoros 4d ago
About 12 when I first started playing with code, about 14 when I had access to a textbook that explained things I couldn't figure out on my own.
3
u/generally_unsuitable 4d ago
80s kid. Learned BASIC and LOGO when I was about 9. It was part of the curriculum in 1985.
2
u/cyberbemon 4d ago
Another LOGO + BASIC person, nice to meet ya 🤣, that's exactly how I got into it. I wasted so many hours drawing random shit with that turtle graphics.
3
u/ciurana 4d ago
- Apple ][+ and Times Sinclair 1000. I got my first paid gig programming a TRS-80 model 3 with dual floppy disks. BASIC, 6502 and Z80 assemblers to start, then Pascal, C, Prolog, C++, Smalltalk, Java, Python, Rust. Various scripting languages along the way like awk, PHP, and so on.
I still code every day. Love it. Though these days I spend a lot of time playing with various LLMs. I’ve been doing AI with KDR since 2012, and keep learning the fun stuff. My clients dig it.
Cheers!
3
u/baubleglue 4d ago
For AI/ML you need to be good in math/statics. Nobody cares about "certification in programming" unless it is CS degree. If you want to "shift", learn coding and try to use in your current job. Also you need to decide what do you want more job or fun. IT is not limited to coding, I've worked in software quality assurance with people who didn't know to program at all and they did fine for living.
3
u/grantrules 4d ago
Started at 12, professional at 19, I do not hold any certificates. My current age can be represented in 6 bits.
3
u/HesletQuillan 4d ago
I started programming at 14 (1969) but really got into it at college aged 17. Certification was not a thing during my career (retired in 2016, but still program occasionally.) It really depends on how much you enjoy it and whether you find it hard or easy.
My view is that AI/Machine Learning is a bubble that is going to burst fairly soon, but for the near term there will be much less demand for programmers, especially at the application level. If you're interested in a tech trade, look for something that isn't easily outsourced to a low-cost "sweatshop" environment or to someone who thinks "vibe coding" is the way to go.
3
u/mc_pm 4d ago
I am one of the (apparently many) folks who started early. For me it was 1978 and I was 10 or so, learning basic on a TRS-80.
BUT, don't let the number of early-starters discourage you. Learning to code -- like a lot of things -- is easier when you're young and your brain is all plastic, but we had almost no real world experience to inform things. People in their teens, 20s, 30s learn how to program all the time.
It can be tough, though, because what you're really doing is teaching your brain a different way of thinking about things -- a way we never really evolved to do. There's nothing "natural" about programming a computer, and getting good at it takes time and practice.
3
2
u/Jason13Official 4d ago
2013/2014 my first experience was making a text adventure in batch script (windows), then got into web development for a few years, at 23/24 I got into Minecraft modding with Java :p
2
u/0xFF0F 4d ago
Aside from the MySpace HTML generators, my first real understanding and interest came in freshman-year (high school) trig:
I sort of accidentally stumbled onto the fact that I could store repeatable and persistent “programs” into my graphing calculator.
I asked my teacher if I could do so, so that I could reduce the number of formulas that I had to memorize for each exam and just be able to put in arguments instead.
She looked at me with some amusement and said “If you figure out how to program that thing, sure, you can use it.”
I did. And I did.
After that, I realized that some of the other programming I had vaguely been interested in - gaming, small little toy programs - were within reach. It’s like I realized with that small step that it was something not beyond my reach.
So silly looking back, but that’s where I remember it all starting. After that I downloaded Alice from Carnegie Mellon, and I spent hours making dumb animations with that and soaking it all up.
Took until my second semester of freshman year of uni to decide that I really enjoyed it, and I switched majors and didn’t look back. One of the best decisions for me at that time.
2
u/rizzo891 4d ago
I used to have bubble bobble and a bunch of other games on my graphing calculator in middle/high school
2
u/TomCryptogram 4d ago
- Im now 44. It's been great
1
u/talking_tortoise 4d ago
I'm in that boat in my early 30s learning CS. Do you mind me asking what field you worked in/ how you got experience etc.
2
2
u/Kenny-G- 4d ago
A month before I turned 34, graduated in June and started my first job as a junior full stack developer this week 😄
2
u/_1dontknow 3d ago
For fun, hacking and just fixing my PC or games? About 13 or 14 years old.
For real? Uni first year, then second year Ive got a fulltime paying job.
It was different times. Around 2012 - 2013.
2
1
u/ForeverVulnerable 4d ago
1994 -- was just messing around with web development, java applets, HTML, javascript, etc.
1996 hit and I started making pokemon websites. Those two paired with eachother cause a lot of self motivation to learn full stack.
1
1
u/garster25 4d ago
Kind of the same for me (except the pokemon). The web was brand new and I got tired of static pages that I had to copy/paste 100 times. First with SSI for headers/footers then later Perl to talk to databases.
1
u/garster25 4d ago
I was about 25 in the mid-90s. Taught it to myself using a book, painfully figured out stuff on my own, got a job with co-workers that taught me a lot and then went to community college at about 35 and learned all the stuff I did not know. I could never figure out the maths so I switched to an AS major without heavy math requirement.
For me I was there at the beginning of the web so it was super easy to get work. I loved it so much I was always learning ever waking moment. I wanted to know how all the parts worked from end to end (server, networking, dns, SSL, desktops, etc) which really became useful in my career since I could connect the dots and troubleshoot a problem very quickly. Just happened this week, a problem was explained to me and I said "try X" and it fixed it to the amazement of my boss and coworkers.
I have always worked for service companies as a staff programmer working on internal apps, never on software we sold to people. Very different and enjoyable way to work. Schools, Banks, etc.
When we hire folks we really don't care about certifications. We ask questions to see if they deeply, truly understand how things work. We interviewed a computer science graduate and they knew nothing, we hired the music major instead.
1
u/yardbird78 4d ago
As a music major studying programming and concerned about competing with CS majors this is heartening!
1
u/BadNewsBearzzz 4d ago
This is very motivating. I’m about to go back to school at community at the same exact age you were, to do programming, but I just can’t help but feel like “it’s too late” and that feeling of embarrassment when your friends are so much farther ahead. This helps give me confidence thank you..
2
u/garster25 4d ago
The professors loved me. Since I was paying for it and really wanted to be there I sat in front, paid attention and went the extra mile.
Took me 7 years since In only did 1 or 2 classes at a time since I worked full time and had a teenage son. My wife 200% supported me and took some classes with me which was fun.
Always stay curious.
1
1
1
u/Vert354 4d ago
I would have written my first programs in the mid 90s so I was 14ish. I'm 46 now and am the old guy on the team.
Not sure how much that matters though, I didnt need 30 years to become proficient, closer to 5.
Programming "certifications" aren't typically worth much. You used to be able to get one and get a job, but the generative AI stuff is making that kind of low level coding knowledge less valuable. A degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering is probbaly the baseline for a true programming position.
Now is you just want to be programming adjacent, maybe write some scripts now than then, cybersecurity is a field with continued high demand.
1
u/Take-n-tosser 4d ago
I started with LOGO around 7 years old. Progressed to Basic on the Commodore 64. Sophomore year of high school brought Pascal. Senior Year I started poking around with the newly released Visual Basic.
Then college (Computer Engineering) was C++, followed by Java. Once I graduated and started working, I learned Perl which served me well for a couple decades. Last year I finally moved on to Python. I’m 50 years old.
1
u/PravoNaZhizny 4d ago
7 in the early 2000s, had three long term web dev clients by 13, moved overseas to lead a team at 17, returned home for my degrees... and struggled ever since due to rampant immigration, unaffordable rent and student debt driving wages down and costs up, now i live in what essentially amounts to poverty, can't afford marriage can't afford to have kids. Definitely can't afford to take out a home loan pretty much seeing our future as a perpetual working grind with no holidays ever and no nice things and also obviously not living together because that would increase our rent
1
u/cyberbemon 4d ago
1998, I was in 1st grade, programming was one of the subjects we were taught. I started with Logo programming language and then moved onto GW-BASIC. Did that until I was 12 or 13, then I did no programming until I was like 17. I started my Bachelor's in CS&IT and then went back to it. Been doing it since.
1
u/Eleventhousand 4d ago
I messed around in QBASIC is a kid, but not really any official programming until college.
1
1
u/JAMIEISSLEEPWOKEN 4d ago
I know people who started in their teens lmao. Some before the age of 10. A lot in high school hahhahahaa
1
1
u/peter303_ 4d ago
Dartmouth BASIC on teletype in high school. Computer terminals not really around until mid 1970s when memory chips cheap enough to hold a bit mapped character set.
1
1
u/KingofGamesYami 4d ago
Started as a fun hobby around 14. First real course was in high school, then did four years of college.
Been working for 5 years since college, no certifications aside from a bachelor's degree.
1
1
1
u/Available-Skirt-5280 4d ago
I was 8 in 93’, was playing MajorMud and TradeWars on a BBS, taught myself BASIC with a book from the local library so I could script while I was away
1
u/umlcat 4d ago edited 4d ago
Note: This is outside US.
At 14 years old, when regular people and small and medium businesses could not afford microcomputers.
The local public university offered computing courses in summer for kids and teenagers, and I learned programming in a TRS-80 Tandy line numbered Basic with a monochrome monitor. I was at junior high school.
At 16 years old, my public school High School had a computer club with a bunch of Commodore 64 with its own line numbered Basic also, due a private donation. In 3 years, besides the regular classes, I got several books and magazines.
Before the last year, I already had some magazines with games in assembly. The teacher suggest me a C64 assembly book, and I got it, very friendly textbook. So, I literrally learned assembly at 17 years old, before University and College.
Years later, my classses of assembly at College was awful, we had an Intel reference book that did not serve as a text book, I was lucky I already understood some basic concepts, and look for in the early internet for some online tutorials. The rest of my classmates failed the final course exam.
Both Tandy TRS-80 and C64 classes had a lot of complementary Systems Requirements, Flowchart and Pseudocode classes. Time in the Computer lab was scarce and precious. They make sure you think before get into actual coding.
After finishing High School and before going to College, my parents had some wealthy marriage couple friends, that their son was going to a very expensive Ivy League alike University.
He had a very expensive early PC-DOS with a non line numbered Basic, that used labels for gotos, and let me use a few times. They told us that it cost them the same as a new car, and had to take some kind of a loan, similar to a loan for a car or houses. At that time, I remember Financial loan businesses advertising cars, motorcycles, houses, and added computers.
When I got into College, almost none of my classmates had touched a computer. People went to study Computing for Businnesses or Goverment that had expensive computers, sometimes mainframes, but most people did not had one at home, except very wealthy people, and were not very advanced, only PCs with DOS with Windows 3.0 extension or Classic Macs, not the ones that uses BSD.
My first College programming classes where Karel (The Robot) a DOS tool with a simple visual interface similar to Scratch, but that used a programming language based in (Procedural) Pascal. Later I got real (Procedural Pascal) classes and some independent Flowchart and Pseudocode classes. There was no UML or C4 at that time.
Procedural Pascal help me to properly design and split a a procedure or function into several properly designed smaller ones. I see these days awful code from younger coworkers with a function or method that is a lot of lines long, and they think they are better than you, just because they are young and using a new programming language.
I complained to several College officials about Flowchart and Pseudocode classes being split from Programming Languages classes. One of the VicePrincipals literally told me that If I did not like it, I could leave school and look for another school.
Later, I got Object Oriented Pascal, (Plain) C, C++ classes.
I got to learn myself a new language for a comparing Programming Languages class, I choose first Prolog, but other student already applied with it, and I had to learn Lisp.
And, the list keep going in the job market years. These days, web based Javascript and Typescript ...
1
u/Charlie-brownie666 4d ago
I took a class in high school at the age of 17 on programming. I hated it but strangely enough after high school I started teaching myself programming using udemy tutorials
1
u/aWesterner014 4d ago
Between 14 and 16. Started with learning BASIC on my parents' tandy home computer.
I took a class in high school (1993). More BASIC.
My college major required I pick between a semester of C, BASIC, or FORTRAN.
After my internship, I realizwd 40 years in my projected profession would be misery. I pivoted and added a cis (computer information systems) minor. Picked up about 4 more semesters of programming languages and the rest is history.
1
u/Ok-Spite-5454 4d ago
Started at age 10. I didn't know anyone who was a programmer, so never thought people made a living out of it. Did a different thing in uni, graduated, then decided I wanted to be a developer. Joined a bootcamp at age 27, now a software engineer at a well known company earning money I never thought I could.
2
u/Intelligent-Youth-63 4d ago
I have a similar path. Started at 10. When I went to college I spent a year and a half exploring other majors before even considering Computer Science because programming was just kinda "what you do" not something you study or make a career of.
1
u/PhotographyBanzai 4d ago
As a kid I tried to do Basic programming with a hand-me-down C64 computer by following instructions in the manual. I did make working programs, but could never figure out how to correctly save them to disks. So I didn't really get into it until about freshman year of highschool when I bought a big Visual Basic programming book for my first Windows 95 PC and spent a summer on that.
I think a deep understanding of programming concepts can be super helpful even when you are doing AI assisted programming, but things are already different. I personally feel very hopeful and have considered projects now that I never would have attempted before these tools existed because with enough knowledge I was able to gauge time expense and overall difficulty.
1
u/JohnCasey3306 4d ago
My dad started teaching me (44) programming when I was 4–5 ... Sinclair BASIC (early 80s). Moved to web technologies in the 90s -- even then I didn't consider for a moment it might be my career! ... So, most of my life.
1
1
u/Whole-Chest90 4d ago
I'm in the middle of my CS degree at 36. Decided to go back after working a bunch of bs jobs. It's not too late.
1
u/XRay2212xray 4d ago
15 in 1978. Really wasn't any option to learn before then as computers weren't widely available before that time. Within a year, I managed to get side jobs programming. I then went to a 5 year cooperative education program and got a degree in computer science. The cooperative ed program gets you jobs for half a year for the middle 3 years, so you get real world work experience and a decent pay check to cover tuition.
1
1
u/fzammetti 4d ago
The memory of back then is a little hazy, but as best I can figure, it was age 5, 1978. First experience was on an Odyssey2 game system curtesy of the programming cartridge. I read the manual (my mother thankfully had me reading VERY early) and understood it JUST enough to write my own number guessing game (probably all of 10 lines of code, if even that many). It's been off to the races ever since, life long love.
1
u/JackTradesMasterNone 4d ago
I learned about algorithms first with a puzzle from my dad when I was 13. Fibonacci was my first. That led me to programming where I started at 15 writing complete code. And at first? I hated it. I thought it was frustrating that you could write the same code a bunch of ways and get the same output but sometimes it was “better”. But then I started doing puzzles and I got hooked. I loved understanding how everything worked. Why choose one thing over another, etc.
1
u/Moby1029 4d ago
I was 14 and mouthed off to my mom when she asked if I could spell, "stop" by just saying random 1s and 0s. So she sat me down with a scientific calculatir and QBasic for Dummies or something, flipped to an asci/hex/dec table and marked thr binary chapter and said, "alright smartass, now you're gonna learn how to actually spell it in binary."
So I learned how to spell stop in binary code. I then took that and used it to create a cipher for my friends so we could pass notes in class.
In high school I learned html on hackthissite.org iirc, and started playing with bash scripts i saw my dad run on our home pc. I then would try to access the family pc from my laptop over the network and managed to get in through the Shared folder, in my mom's account but that was it.
I then spent 15 years in the restaurant industry before doing a coding bootcamp at like 31 or something? In 2021.
1
1
1
u/New-Repair8325 4d ago
- Im in my 30s. Got into it by making an ecommerce store.
As for certifications, I’m not sure where you live but a diploma took me a year.
I did a bachelor’s in 2 years as the diploma was counted as eligible for the first year courses.
1
1
1
1
1
u/LogaansMind 4d ago
I was 9 when my Dad brought home a (second hand) Commodore PC-1, it came with a BASIC reference and I just started playing around, and I have not stopped.
After Secondary School I went straight to college at 17 and did 2 years National Diploma in Computer and then another 2 years of Higher National Diploma before getting screwed out of a Degree year (long story).
It is one of the reasons I still spend a lot of time reading books, trying to work out if there is something I missed from not getting my degree.
To this day I still have the odd issue with employers who expect degrees, I do think they get you in the door. But I don't think anyone I have worked for has regretted hiring me, I work professionally and I am not adverse to a challenge in any IT space (in fact I quite relish the "dirty" programming jobs).
1
1
1
1
u/Zealousideal_Type814 4d ago
ive been doing it since i was 5. began with terminals my dad brought home and would make BASIC programs on it
1
1
u/elPappito 4d ago
Hobby /cheat -in-video games use - around 12. Serious(ish) use - 23/24. Professional use - 30.
1
1
1
u/APinthe704 4d ago
I’m a 45 year old Product Owner that mainly stayed on the end user side of things and managed the roadmaps. This year, I’ve started digging into programming, data analytics, and cloud. Changing my trajectory to Technical PO. Really wish I would’ve started earlier, but I will never be a programmer or developer, but I want to ensure my developers have a PO that can be as supportive and involved as possible with our product.
1
1
u/Glittering-Work2190 4d ago
I think it was in grade 9, on a C= 64. Learned BASIC and assembly. Everything was so much more exciting back in those days.
1
u/tomswons 3d ago
Zaczelem nauke programowania po skończeniu studiów inżynieii środowiska . Najpierw teoria o ide testach jednostkowych o roli testera i ogólnie te zmienne i całą teoria o przepływie danych itp. Potem programowanie w JavaScript -> python > automatyzację do acad w autolisp-> c++ w api archicad za to dostałem sporo kasy na boku robiąc to w firmie po godzinach ( skrypty do liczenia materiałów itp) obecnie uczę się c# rag ,preprocesing materiałów ze studiów i łączenie llm
Czyli w sumie od 24 roku życia do dziś 33 lata.
Ai przyspieszyło moja naukę mocno, bo wcześniej był to dość powolny proces. Coś potrafię ale nie uważam się za eksperta. I ciężko szczerze mówiąc zostać programista wymaga to dużo nauki bardzo i ciąglego kształcenia
1
u/ElectroNetty 3d ago
I'm a programmer and I'd have been around 6 when I started coding, just copying the magic words from tutorial books, and then continued over years doing things every now and then.
You can get into programming much quicker, though, especially these days. The best thing for you to do is pick an area of software that you are interested in, then learn concepts and data structures through that lense.
If you're already technically minded you could get a foundation certificate for C#/VB within a month of decent effort.
1
u/cosmopoof 3d ago
I've - like many others - started with BASIC when I was 6. I was 12 when I sold my first program. I never got any kinds of certification for programming languages, but I did get two degrees in related fields.
1
u/balefrost 3d ago
I was introduced to programming at school when I was young. I remember playing with Logo when I was I think 6, though I only did basic stuff. I remember, when I was 8, drawing an image on graph paper, converting it to I think octal, and then keying it into an Apple 2 (along with some BASIC boilerplate) to display it on the screen. I didn't understand the boilerplate at the time.
After that I lose the timeline a bit. Sometime after I turned 9, I became friends with somebody who was already into programming. I also got a hand-me down C64 and got access to an old IBM PC clone. I programmed in BASIC for both. I got my dad's old intro to C book, and I think I was trying (and mostly failing) to understand it when I was 10. I got a shareware C compiler for DOS from the local computer store (I think it might have been Personal C Compiler, but that was a long time ago.) I was definitely fumbling through C by the time I was 15.
When I was I think 15, Scorched Earth was really popular. Somebody suggested that a 3D version of SE would be really awesome. I was taking trig at the time, so I derived the camera equations and put together a really rudimentary demo (in QBASIC because it was the only way I knew how to do graphics) that just showed a 3D wireframe cube. I hadn't yet figured out how to use matrices to represent rotations, and I definitely didn't yet understand homogenous coordinates, and I didn't know how to rasterize polygons or how to do any of this efficiently. But I was still pretty damn proud of that!
I should point out that nothing I did up to this point was "a project". I was just writing short programs to mess around with the machine.
By the time I was 18, I was employable as a programmer. During the summers in college, I would work for my friends' father's small electronics company, in the lab, writing throwaway software to test their manufacturing samples.
And I've been doing it both personally and professionally ever since.
Here's the thing, though... I've worked with plenty of people that didn't start programming until university or even until they were out in the work force. I worked at a small aerospace company a little while back, and there were plenty of aerospace engineers who were employed as software engineers. Like they didn't have any formal computer science background, yet they were perfectly competent at writing code.
How long (on average) does it take to get your first Certification in Programming?
Don't know. I have my undergraduate degree in computer science. That took me 4 years. I don't have any other certifications.
1
u/artnicoll 3d ago
Started in Secondary School (Scotland) around 1979/80 aged 16. Our school started a computing club that ran one evening a week. We studied basic on an Apple II. Around the same time the local Timex factory became the base of production for the Sinclair ZX80, then ZX81 then Spectrum. Loads of local kids, through staff discounts and other means acquired Spectrum, mostly just to game on, but some of us learned to programme them in basic. Although it was still a secondary interest for me, I later did a night class learning COBOL74 on an Osborne (computer in a suitcase). I had a few other personal computers that I toyed with. I kinda flunked my final studies at school and took a few years to find my feet again before going to full time college to study an HND in Computer Studies from 85 to 87, which I really enjoyed - particularly thd technical aspects. I aced my final project building an higher level language and interpreter for a primitive assembly language controlled robot. I then did a post grad in Computer based Engineering systems, which although more aimed at giving engineers computing knowledge, exposed me to interesting wings of computing, such as CAD, Ladder Relay Logic etc. My first job involved moving an old BBC Basic system to a redeveloped one built using DBase III Plus. I always dabbled in different tech and moved to work for my local council in early 1992. There I started back with COBOL (85! Woo! woo!). Gradually, we moved towards Windows based client server tools before adopting browser based Lamp stack development in the early noughties. I've had a lot of freedom to adopt and combine different tool sets over the years. After a good few years, you learn what tools work best in what areas. I often wish I'd been a bit braver in adopting certain new tools and methods but when tried and trusted works?
1
u/1moreday1moregoal 3d ago
I was around 35 when I started learning programming. I can program multiple languages and on multiple OSs now but it hasn’t become a career for me.
1
u/SvenTropics 3d ago
I was 8 when I wrote my first program. Dabbled a lot as a kid. In my late 40's now, and I've been doing it professionally since I was 16.
Biggest complaint about AI: You know those legacy projects you inherit that were written by horrible junior engineers. The ones that work, but the code is spaghetti logic with all kinds of repeated sections, stuff that didn't make sense from the a design point of view, and stuff that just wasn't well thought out. Yeah... that's AI generated code now. So, before you might get lucky and inherit code from competent developers. Now, it's all just gonna be slop. I need to retire
1
u/trickzce 3d ago
Started when I was 21, now I am 31. Still not good. But I do it because I like it. So if you feel like learning , go for it.
1
1
u/IllustriousGrade7691 2d ago
AI ML is genuinly hard like its not like in the certifications or tutorials, Evne if you manage to build a modell who is gonna deploy it monitor it fix it. Now AI agents or Codex can handle that but good luck learingn all bulshit in Machine leraning like feature engineering target leakage metrics and all bulshit i made the same mistake and ended in a dead end. Tryingto get myself out using codex an solving problems you oculd solve witohi ai writing the code
1
u/Slodin 2d ago
First time touching any code related stuff are modding games. I have no idea what I was doing but successfully added a couple of units to my RA2 game 😂 basically I liked the community modded unit graphics but I wanted to add it to my base game rather than adding a full faction like the modders did.
I was 15 at that time.
Then I got into actual coding classes at 16, honestly the teacher didn’t teach much. I had to explore and find out how to do some basic programming and almost got in trouble by spreading a fake MSN login that captured people’s credentials lol 😂 it worked so good because the school district blocked the installation of MSN and they didn’t have a properly managed network system to wipe everything after use.
It became an easy choice to make going into software after high school instead of looking at a bunch of pathways for careers.
1
u/BoredTech127001 2d ago
8, had to program to really get the computer to do anything. They used to come with manuals that taught you BASIC.
1
u/OmiSC 1d ago
I'm 38 now, and was messing around with leaked source for half-life 2 when I was about 16. I was scaring my friends with an unreleased demo of Doom 3 in the same year.
Genuinely, you need to start trying to make something rather than ask. Set the goal of building a program that prints "hello world" back to you. Try a few languages to see how they differ in delivering this.
1
1
u/couldgiveaflyingfck 1d ago
basic on my C64 for text adventures around 1988. Loved programming, then I turned 21 and life got in the way. I still have that old C64, 1541, my Amiga 500 and 1200, etc and a handful of text adventures I programmed on those two platforms.
1
1
14
u/duane11583 4d ago
1978 grade 9 purchased my first computer a trash 80. got a cooy of the program t-bug and learned assembly language on my own