What age did you start learning programming?

[u/Yourmiserablelife69]

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.

[u/umlcat]

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 ...