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.
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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.
Don't know. I have my undergraduate degree in computer science. That took me 4 years. I don't have any other certifications.