How do the young start programming nowadays? [closed]?

I think that my story would qualify pretty well for this question. At the time of this writing, I'm actually 12 years old. I got started with VB6 (yes, VB, I know, argh) when I was 7, as my dad showed it to me.

That got me really intrigued, and, with the help of my dad, I built my first app: a word-search solver. Later, I moved into learning HTML: my dad directed me towards W3Schools, and I spent my free time examining the tutorials on HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc. When I was 9 or 10, we had a guest who was a C# programmer. He recommended some C# books for me, which I used to familiarize myself with the language.

Two summers ago, I took a C# course thru the local university's extension classes, which further increased my understanding of programming. I found myself very intrigued into books and blogs like Joel on Software, which then brought me here, to Stack Overflow. Lately, I've written a few data collection and analysis programs for a non-profit, as well as starting a programming club at school, creating an open-source project (SOApiDotNet, a library for the pre-alpha Stack Overflow API; by the way, if you're looking for something like this, use SXAPI instead), and more.

So, for how I found my way into programming, long story short: My dad showed me VB6 Learned HTML, JS, etc. Learned C# (books and a college course) Found Stack Overflow!

68 If you're really 12 then your grammar skills are way beyond the average adult. You should go far. Tip: hide in the library during your high school years to keep away from bullies - that's what I did (mildly successful strategy) – PP.

Mar 17 '10 at 14:41 28 I want to +1 you just for writing so well at your age. Every day, it seems like fewer and fewer people know spelling and grammar, and seeing someone at 12 with this kind of writing almost brings a tear of joy to my eye. But since that isn't a good criteria for upvoting, I'm just gonna +1 you for the story instead.

– Michael Madsen Mar 17 '10 at 15:26 20 Impressive, but don't get to entrenched in the C#/Java camp though. Check out other programming paradigms as well -- functional languages springs to mind (scala, ruby ...). Before your brain gets stuck.

– Martin Wickman Mar 17 '10 at 15:30 87 One tip that you might not hear here: don't spend all of your young days writing code. Keep improving other things about yourself too. I personally wish I would have exercised my social skills more at a young age.

Balance = important. – temp2290 Mar 17 '10 at 18:29 27 Let me compliment you by saying that I absolutely do not believe that you are 12 years old. – Blankasaurus Mar 17 '107 at 3:04.

I'm just exactly 25. I got into programming via the web - started out doing HTML. It was actually the American Girl magazine which got me into the idea of making my own web page in 6th grade, although I didn't start until a year later.

Yeah, American Girls - in case you can't tell I'm female. At the ripe old age of 13 I got Java books from the library, but couldn't quite wrap my head around them. I did a bit of copy-paste Javascript, but mostly just HTML.In 9th grade I took an accelerated programming course (intro computer science and AP computer science in one year) at my local magnet high school.

There I learned C++, but C-style, from my teacher. For the rest of the four years I took as many programming classes as the school offered - I ended up covering MIPS (didn't get it at all), LISP (not a fan back in those days) because MIT's intro to computer science used Scheme and our teachers were trying to prepare us in case we ended up there, some basic OpenGL libraries for C++, and enough C++ to get by. Taught myself PHP towards the end of high school as well to program an online game for a capstone project.

I had high school internships using VBA macros for Word and C++ with SQL Server in Visual Studio. From there my undergraduate degree in computer science and subsequent career in computer science were history. On the note of steering your child, though, I'd highly discourage it.

Two friends of mine were being pushed hard by programmer fathers to be programmers. One is now a graduate student in the classics. The other majored in English but did end up in technical writing (as opposed to fiction).

I don't remember either appreciating the constant nagging to take the classes I eagerly signed up to take. If my parents had been encouraging me into electrical engineering, theoretical physics, art, or some other career, I wouldn't have been happy either.

7 +1 for discouraging pushing the kid. Don't push stuff through kid's throat. Let kid take the initiative.

You can at least make it interesting for the kid by telling/showing something neutral about it. – BalusC Mar 17 '10 at 14:18 14 +1: world needs more programmer chix :) – Juliet Mar 17 '10 at 15:02 1 It was funny when this had exactly 25 upvotes; after all, the first sentence is: "I'm just exactly 25. " – Maxim Zaslavsky May 13 '10 at 2:10 2 Happy birthday.

– Ron May 24 '10 at 12:09.

Reluctantly 23 here :) So here's my experience as young programmer chix0rz: So let's start with my dad (henceforth known as daddums, dadly, or old man scowl face), since he really got me interested in programming in the first place. He earned a living in the military fixing aircraft, but after 15 years, he'd gone as far as possible as a mechanic, and the work was too routine to make work worthwhile anymore. So he went looking for new experiences, something exciting, challenging, fun, and remarkable -- gave up pretty quickly on that, settled for computer programming instead.

I'm not really sure what prompted programming out of all other careers, but I remember MS Office 97 was all the rage at the time and my dad had a knack for hacking Excel macros. That seemed as good a reason as any, so he went to school and eventually earned a BS in computer science. I remember him coming home with programming books and showing me finished homework assignments.

The very first was a VB5 app whose awesomeness rivaled that of Gmail, Crysis, and the Large Hadron Collider combined -- a VB5 winform app showing a square. You click on the square, it turns into a circle; click on the circle, it turns back into a square. AMAZING!

I'd always taken it for granted that software "exists", but never really thought about where it came from. So it blew my mind to see a completely novel, original application which didn't exist anywhere else in the universe -- cool! After the experience, I'd sit and watch my dad finish his homework assignments.

And when he left for work, I picked his books and went page by page, copying every example from page to screen and picking up things along the way. Writing code eventually became a hobby, spiraled out of control and became a career. My first "real" program used a timer, a label control, and clever use of the Left, Right, and Mid functions to spell swear words char by char on screen.

I'm still coding for fun, except writing more sophisticated programs. The latest one spells swear words that fly around in 3D using DirectX.

10 Swear words are a great motivator for novice programmers, and a great byproduct of advanced ones. – Gregg Lind Mar 22 '10 at 0:25 1 I was so inspired by your answer, I blogged a bit about it... writeonly.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/you-k... – Gregg Lind Mar 22 '10 at 0:38.

I'm 23 (and 11 months). We got our first computer when I was - 4 years old, I think? Something along those lines, at least.

I fairly quickly managed to pick up enough to use it for basic stuff (i.e. , start games). I also have a vague recollection of one night - it was around 10 PM, so I should really have been sleeping then - where my parents couldn't make something work, but where I could tell them what they had to do.

I'm pretty sure I hadn't started school back then, so that means I was no more than 5 years old at that point in time. In other words, it was pretty clear I had a knack for these things fairly early. I did type in a couple of BASIC programs from books before then, but I think my first piece of actual code, written by myself, was when I was 11 or so.

That was in QBasic. Following that, I progressed to Windows via Delphi, and ported the two "larger" applications I'd written to a graphical environment in 2001 or 2002 (I think I started working with it in 2001, and released the first version of the apps in 2002). It's still my favorite language, and I continue to work with it when I have the possibility, but I've also worked with many languages since then - PHP, SQL, C#, C++, Java, Haskell, Prolog, Javascript, VBA... and I'm sure I've forgotten one or two on that list.

I've also, purely for fun, written a small . COM file in pure 16-bit x86 assembly which does nothing but busy-wait for 4 minutes, while using 100% CPU - because 4 minutes is how long it takes for the coffee to be ready once the water boils. After writing the code, I then assembled it by hand, looking up opcodes in manuals and on reference websites, because, well, I could.(I don't even drink coffee, but the pure geekiness of it was worth it.

).

I'm 4 and 1/2 years old. I started at 3 with embedded C programming when my Dora the Explorer play house started malfunctioning. My dad handed me a screwdriver and told me to see if I could figure it out.

I've since progressed to C++ and PERL and I'm currently trying to work around the parental filters that my parents have applied to the computer so I can access the Power Rangers site that my mum thinks is too grown up for me (although I need a booster seat to access the keyboard). I hope to some day have fingers long enough to allow me to hit ctrl-alt-delete when the computer locks itself.

10 years ago, my sisters boyfriend at the time was a programming consultant for a big company and would do a lot of his work at our house where I would always nag him to show me how to program. Anyways one day, the internet was down, he was unable to perform any work and he got fed up with me asking that he showed me how to open up Notepad and write simple HTML and load it into the browser. In high-school I learned how to program cheat-sheets onto my TI-83 calculator written in BASIC.

After high-school then came college.

2 +1 I learned on my TI-83 too :D – wsanville Mar 17 '10 at 22:19 1 Sad part was (which I hate to admit) I spent more time figuring out how to program calculations and output the correct results that I didn't put any effort into actually studying. This was single-handedly one of my biggest regrets in school. – Anthony Forloney Mar 17 '10 at 23:11.

I'm 21 and I first started programming Pascal, Delphi and Java, because these were taught in school. However, I really started programming in the first year of university, with Ruby. There were no courses teaching ruby, but some of the other freshmen already were ruby pros and I was basically learning by copying.

Later I also started learning Java, because I needed some money and all the interesting jobs offered by the university mostly required solid java knowledge. Also, in school there were quite a few people who spent a LOT of hours doing TI-83 programming (some BASIC dialect), and some of them got quite impressive results.

My Father bought me a V-Tech learning computer for my 9th birthday. Beside all the boring quizzes in it, it also had a very basic BASIC interpreter one could use. I did because I had nothing else to do.

I quickly realized how much fun programming is, and spend most of my time coding BASIC. (They kindly placed a BASIC tutorial in the manual) The next step was the ancient Intel-286 PC my aunt gave me. Again, it could only run boring games on the monochrome display.

Not much fun. While digging around, I found Microsofts QBASIC and fell in love with it. I could do so much more then my V-Tech thingy and spend most of the time coding boring text adventures until I realized I can do "real" graphics (By reading the famous bannana.

Bas source). Sadly, my mother wanted me to go outside and socialize with all those non-nerdy kids and limited my "Computer Time" to two hours a day. So I had to find other ways to spend actually more time with all this programming thing.So I bought books and read them.

In the retrospective, it was a good thing that my mother limited the time as it caused me to read books. I never had friends doing "computer stuff" at this time, but someone gave me a copy of Visual Basic 5 (I got a way better machine before, thanks dad!) and out of the sudden, I could do Buttons, Windows and all those nice things. As my "Computer Time" was still limited I read many Visual Basic books and coded a simple game as my last Visual Basic project.

And now the funny part begins. I wanted to have a website for my game and build it with front page. But I wanted the uber-cool effects on my website everyone had those days.

But I had absolutely no JavaScript knowledge.So I decided to buy a book... In my cluelessness I bought a "Java" book instead of "JavaScript". I read a few chapters and realized that was not what I wanted but noticed its awesomeness and learned Java. It was a hard time with all those OOP stuff.

I remember reading the chapter about Polymorphism serveral times because I did not understand it. Fun times. :-) I dug into C++ later because all those bad-ass games where written in it.

But I eventually dropped it later. I stayed with Java, read many (and some bad) books. I cannot remember in detail how I touched all the other stuff I learned until now (I'm 24 ATM) but that is my "how it began" story.

I do not have any degree in CS, still read many books and try to learn as much as possible. I got employed as a developer 5 years ago for a german startup because of my skills and advanced to a "Senior Backend Developer". All based on self-tought skills.So, it is possible to start a career that way.

Beside my own story, I think, with enough nerdiness, kids will find out what is fun for them and will choose programming if you, as parents, allow them to.

As Aaron notes in Primer: They took from their surroundings what was needed... and made of it something more I think most kids, if they want to start programming, will use whatever hardware/language is at hand: I learned to program GW-BASIC (AT&T PC300), and later QBasic (on a ~1995 Acer P90) and VB6 (a Pentium MMX 200MHz), as my family upgraded their PCs over the years. I have a friend that started with assembler on the Commodore 64. He now automates stock trades using Excel sheets + macros.

A number of my friends that had computers with mice (because their parents had $$$) became graphic artists. I knew a lot of people in high school who got into programming via graphic calculators, which they were forced to buy for classes. My younger brother is learning because of the hand-me-down equipment he's gotten.

He also reads Hack-a-day religiously, and was given funds to build an arcade PC. In short, if it's easy for them to get their hands on, chances are that's how they'll learn to program. Having a parent that programs helps too, I think.

I have secretly signed up for many sites saying I was born in 1987 (ten years before my real birthday, making me 24 at the moment). I have been coding in HTML for as long as posible, and I never got any help of learning code. It was just, "Hmm...?U.

So I guess a adds an image" or "Why do websites look so cool?" and google tells me about CSS. I then got very sick of this dumb, HTML-only Apple hosting thing, so I switched over to some free web host until I got sick of that, along with no cPanel control, so then I went over to HostGator, with unlimited disk space, transfer data, latest version of cPanel, and PHP4 and 5 mashed together. Z43 Studio (z43studio.com) is where I run and manage my design studio for creating iOS and Web applications, and I run one of my friends band website at shelbytownsend.com I started coding in C/Objective-C/iPhone-SDK in October 2009, and I still have much to learn about the marvelous coding language.

I always get my hopes up when I open Xcode, because I always think I am going to make the worlds best app, and then when I finish the app, and think it is okay, I finally get the news that you can only publish iPhone apps if you are a registered developer, and then I get mad, and see what it takes to be a developer, and hope that someday I'll get to be one, and then somehow, for some reason, my Xcode projects get deleted, and I don't have the applications anymore, but I don't care because I wouldn't be able to publish them anyways. I have an iPhone 4 at the moment, and I do not think that jail breaking a device with iOS 5 is at all worth it, because you don't get anything out of it.

I am using the lego mindstorm to introduce my boys to programming. The product ships with a drag and drop visual programming language that helps kids understand logic and flow charts but there are apis and compiles for java and c for the advanced enthusiasts.

My progression as a programmer went like so: I learned Logo when I was really young. Then the cool thing was to have your own website so I got a tripod website and learned HTML. After that, my father wanted me to learn Visual Basic with him, so I went and took VB6 courses with him.

This was about 1998, if I remember correctly. I thought programming was the hokey-est thing in the world. So I stopped.12th grade I took a programming course, just because I had to.

It was a Java based programming course and everyone was required to have a semester of Computer Science before they graduated, so of course I waited until my last semester. At this point in time I was planning on being a math major, because I loved mathematics.As I sat down to do all the assignments (he gave them all to us early), I found myself wanting to complete the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one... until I was done with the Computer Programming I assignments within just a few weeks. I loved it and couldn't get enough.

The next Fall I started at school as a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics.My first semester we went over Internet front-end design (javascript, html, css, etc) and C++ ideas like pointers, linked-lists, and some other concepts. And in the spring it was assembly and data structures. Through all of this I still preferred java and considered it to be my "first language."

After that spring, I learned Python. I don't remember exactly why I learned Python, but I learned it. It became my favorite language.

I worked with it all summer and learned every little thing I could about it. Anything I learned in C++, I learned how I could possibly do it in Python, usually looking to this website as a reference. From there I learned many other new ideas and concepts between classes and learning outside of class on my own.

Now I try to keep my arsenal filled with the ability to program in Python, C++, Ruby, Java, and then PHP and jQuery for web design (although I use RoR and django, too). I try to be well-versed in web design, database administration, networking, and applied cryptography. I'm still really young, though, so I still consider myself to be "starting" programming.

I was pretty much steered into this concept by my father at a young age with VB and him wanting to program a lot. I was ungrateful at first but now I'm very thankful that he did so, because I think it's led me down a very fun path for life.

I am 19 years old, my 20'th birthday is in October. Both my parents are teachers, none of them know barely anything about a computer beyond utilising it. None of my friends knew how to program.So, when I was 14 I wanted to learn X?

HTML because I wanted to have my own homepage. After some Google:ing I found W3Schools, which I am happy to see that many other found as it is the # 1 site I recommend to those who wants to learn X?HTML. After about 4 months I got tired of plain X?

HTML and wanted a guestbook for my homepage. I walked through the guide at W3Schools/PHP and some other random guestbook how-to. After that I continued on W3Schools with very basic JavaScript and basic SQL.

In March 2008 I started to work for an online youth community where I learned more complex JavaScript, jQuery, SQL, regular expressions and PHP programming according to the MVC model. In June 2009 I left my position at the youth community when I got a job as a web developer on a communications agency in Stockholm, Sweden.My skills in time estimation has been hardly tested with different grades of results since. I have never been "advised" to do anything.

I have been advised to continue school, but I didn't. I only went to second year in gymnasium. I've also learned Photoshop and aquired skills in server administration during these years.

Planning is guessing.

I will steer my children towards Python. Programming is fun again.

I always found the thought of creating my own programs for the computer great, so when I was 10 I bought a book about VB6, written for kids. I soon discovered that VB6 was deprecated so I switched over to VB.NET. Later, I learned the C# syntax.

Then I wanted to create websites, so I looked at HTML and CSS. As I had the need to make them dynamic, I learned PHP and JS. Not too long ago, I got interested in creating iPhone Apps, and so I tried out a little bit of Objective-C.As you can see, the whole thing is pretty interest-driven, and I always learn what I want to do.. ;-).

My son took a few minicourses at the local Science Museum. Right now, what's got him interested is an MMORPG called Roblox (which looks like a version of Lego Wars), which uses Lua for scripts. My wife and I haven't been pushing, but I like seeing him working on Lua scripts and the like.

I'm 22 - I got first interested in programming when (I was about 10) I discovered some BASIC books in a local library. It seemed kind of cool to copy a page of text from the book to the computer and you would have a working simple game. But I've tried to understand it, but I couldn't quite wrap my mind around it, so I just tinkered with variables to "mod" the game.

We had some Pascal programming in school, I was able to make some simple programs. Then I got interested in PHP when I was 14 - did some webpages, played around in it, did some very simple games and.... in 2005 I discovered C#. I immediately fell in love with the language and .net platform, and programming in general - now I can't imagine doing anything else for a living.

When I was a kid, about 10 or so, we had this program at school. It was a little turtle in the middle of a screen. You could type into the terminal simple commands which made the turtle move around.Eg you could type "FD 100" this would move the turtle 100 pixels and draw a line.

You could do other commands "PU" for Pen up which stopped the line while you move somewhere. Now we were given work sheets with a big ol list of commands to type in (basically the output was stars and things like that) Within about 20 minutes I wasnt even looking or caring for the sheet. I was just trying to make this turtle write my name.

Once I could write my name I was trying to write my friends names, then houses and so on and so forth... To the point where I basically got into trouble for not working to the sheet. Shame. I was expressing my creativity :) A couple of years later my folks bought me my first pc.

I started messing with HTML as soon as I was online... My interest continued through secondary school, though there was little I could do on programming there. Then off to college. After college (I took A Level IT and did out of hours classes on programming) I just took a job as I diddnt want all that student debt... I was working as a techie for a manufacturing firm who had bespoke ERP software.

I was very keen to look at the code for this and things just went from there... So yeah. I diddn't get into programming or have it pushed on me as such. Its just something I picked up pretty much on my own from a young age :) If you are interested, the program was called "LOGO" you can find further information here; el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/index.html.

I'm 19, and I got into programming at 17. I had always kind of wanted to try programming, but I didn't really get into until I had to write a TI-BASIC program for school. The Trigonometry class at my high school does a rocketry event every year, and our group had to build two theodolites to measure how high a rocket went.So I had to make a calculator program to do all the calculations quickly on launch day.

After that I tried learning C++, but the book I had confused me with Object Oriented Programming. Luckily my mom had a couple old C books laying around; C Primer Plus 1st Edtion and another book, both from 1991.It was funny how the books talked about ANSI C as being brand new. After about 6 months of using C, my high school set me up with an internship my senior year as a Java programmer.

At the time, I didn't even know Java, so for my first 3 or 4 weeks (part time) I sat at my desk and read a huge Java Book. After learning OOP from Java I finished learning C++, and since then I've learned Python and PHP. Edit: I'm currently in college, and I took Intro to Computer Science last semester.

The class taught Java, which I work with everyday.So I mostly browsed Slashdot the whole class. Also, I ended up with a professor who has been teaching his whole life, and had no real world programming experience. And he was really bad at it too.

I'm 19. Tried some C (or pascal, can't remember) when I was 11, but didn't really do well. Think I was able to print a multiplication table or something like that.

Tried C++ when I was 14-15, but failed quite fast. Tried some scripting languages, but didn't really like it. Then I picked up C again when I was 17, and finally I "cracked the code" after watching some Stanford lessons on YouTube.

Having a basic grasp of asm (and memory) really helped. :P.

I first discovered you could do more with a computer than play games when I was like 12 or 13. (I'm 19 now btw) My brother had randomly thrown a bunch of his junk in my room. Well, along with that junk was some very basic HTML tutorials.

I looked at them and read them and was amazed. Then I started trying to do this on my computer and it worked! Oh joy!

I Played with websites for a few weeks or months and then I discovered . Bat files. How cool.

You can make your computer do stuff with text. Of course, I was one of those silly . Bat virus writers, but it was still cool (and the only thing I infected were pre-infected windows 95 computers that basically didn't work anyway) Then, I went searching for something to let me do some sorta graphics.

I ended up finding out what BASIC is. I first looked at Liberty Basic and then I got tired of the licensing nags and of not being able to create an exe, so I went hunting for others. I then found DarkBasic.

I actually learned programming from this language and wrote a few interesting projects like a media player and a (very crappy) interpreter. DarkBasic was capable of extension by C++ plugins. So I tried to learn C++ on and off to write a plugin.

Well, later I discovered some BasicToC translator and used it to learn how to do certain things and to do more with C/++. Then I found some really simple bootloader + assembly tutorial and was hooked. Making your own OS was awesome!

I then downloaded Turbo C (the only good 16bit compiler I could find) and wrote my first C program/OS that did something half way cool. Then, I began reading more and more on C and learned structs and all that and decided my OS was really crappy code. So I rewrote it and instead used gcc and made a 32bit OS.

And so on and so on...

1 And, in 15 years, you'll have the next windows ;) – RCIX Mar 22 '10 at 11:06.

I'm 23 (Holy Dinah! 23? Where did years 19-22 go?) Like @Adam, my earliest exposure to computers was through DOS games.

Years later (around age 12) I was first exposed to programming, in the form of a couple of old 486's in the corner of my 6th grade classroom that ran QBasic. Around that time I also jumped into the realm of HTML (geocities! Annoying background music!

GIFs! ). After that, my interest in computers somewhat stagnated for a while, although I did take some of the computer-based option courses in juniour high, I was never really interested in the material.

In high school, I was interested in some of the programming options they offered, but I couldn't be bothered to take the intro course(s) that were prerequisites. So instead I took all the auto shop I could and became a total gearhead, and after graduation ended up as an apprentice mechanic. I never really found that work fulfilling, however, so I began looking at changing direction and going the post-secondary route.

What led me to computer science was, unexpectedly, my gearhead tendencies. I was looking at converting a car to fuel injection, and was searching for cheap, universal fuel injection controllers. That's when I stumbled upon the MegaSquirt project, which is best described as an open-source fuel computer, meaning that the total cost was simply the materials needed to build it, a PCB, and a pre-programmed microprocessor (a motorola/freescale M68000 variant).

What tipped me towards computers and programming is that I found myself more interested in the firmware that made the controller tick than anything else. Being open source, the source code was available online, although the 68000 assembly may as well have been greek to me at the time, I was hooked on the desire to know how it worked. I enrolled in the computer science program and the rest is history (remarkably, the chip used in my first two low-level computing courses was the M68000!

). Anyways, I guess the point I'm trying to make in this long, convoluted narrative is that if you want to be a programmer, programming will find you eventually.

I am 25. Everyone around me (except for my mother) always assumed I would follow in my father's footsteps and become a programmer (my mom wanted me to be come a diplomat - go figure). What they also assumed was that I would also go through the whole academic process up to a Ph.D.

Now, the thing is that I was never pushed to do anything. Something sparked my interest - I believe it was the program that my dad wrote when I was about 7 or 8 which required me to do a number of simple computations to get a "success" at the end. I remember my dad showing me after that how to write a small program which acted somewhat like the bios password for a very very old laptop (I was 9 or 10 and I used to play 3d tetris on it).

He also tried showing me some other things - I liked the idea of programming a lot and decided that was going to be my career, but as far as I can remember, it was never something I spent my free time on. However, since I was interested, and since I had decided by the time I was in 5th grade that I would become a programmer, I did my best in middle & high school to follow the programming classes and learn the basics of programming (but, alas, not of how-computers-work - that came only later, much later). This was a success.My dad left me to my own devices so I also tried all the artsy/sciency things that high school had to offer - it was just that I was always better at the silly programming tasks than at the silly physics or English or history tasks.

Therefore nothing really changed, I was still going to be a programmer. Also, it was rather cool to be the one person in the class who was good at maths and programming.By the time I was in 12th grade I was learning some basic data structures and algorithms and attempting some ACM-competition like problems. I was (and probably never will be) a pro in ACM style problems, but it did teach me several things.

College was a different story. I went into a highly theoretical programme - I didn't know this at the time. I liked theory for a while (and by theory I mean all sorts of strange maths, bool algebras, lots and lots of automata theory etc); I kept at my ACM-like problems and I kept doing some simple practical things (mostly php/html/javascript stuff).

The practical courses were few and far between and usually so simple I could ace them with no problems. This got me really annoyed by the 3rd year when I decided it was time to get a job or I would never do anything I liked when I graduated (php wasn't my thing). I went on with school whilst being more and more annoyed with it - I ended up finishing my masters a month ago but it was painful and agonizing and I hated almost every minute of it.

Luckily though I was able to work full time - that got me through.So I started working - and lo and behold that's when it REALLY hit me how fun programming really was. No more school projects, or ACM-style problems - which, although interesting, are really not that glamorous. Learning about data structures (for real, not some generic structure you know you have to use for problem X) and algorithms (n^2 just doesn't cut it in the real world like in the academic one) and concurrency (ha!

There was never concurrency before I started working) and finding solutions to problems is just something real, palpable. I was like a sponge: I've learnt more in 2 and a half years than in the previous 8 combined (having someone to learn from was probably what did it). I think what drives me is the knowledge that I helped write software which is used by people; or, on another project, software which I am confident will end up changing the world.

Also - the idea of how much there is still to learn. Actually that's a concept I can't really even fully grasp - how much there is still to learn.

I'm coming up on 26 soon, and I've been in the field professionally for about 5 years now. When I was really young, my grandfather gave me this Tandy laptop. I used it to write stories, and I remember writing to the "man in the computer" about things I had done that day.

Like a diary, but someone wrote back. Years later, I found out that "man" was my father responding while I was asleep, but that really got me hooked into it. How was the computer talking back?!?

I can remember messing around with QBasic around the time I was 8 and 9 years old, nothing specific, but I'm told I would spend hours with it getting little things to work.My cousin in law had built computers, and he taught me about the hardware aspect of computers. I also helped with tech support at my elementary school! As I got older, I got into gaming more heavily.

Hex editors, command line arguments, all those fun little things that are complex to a 12 year old! Also, Geocities! Personal web pages, HTML?

I did a lot of web pages for friends and family then. Gh school came around and MySpace was just starting to come out, so more web customizing. That got me started into the world of CSS and web standards, and learning why they're important.

Firefox and IE6 issues, etc. I hit college and decided that programming would be my field. My professor was a huge proponent of FOSS.It was a very small school, so he was pretty much in full control about everything we got to see, and the school didn't mind because everything was free! Enter Java, Linux, shell scripting, etc. College taught me how to learn, and the most basic programming information.

Graduated after that, hit the real world of development. I didn't know a thing! All through college, we worked with small one-off applications, and my first code base was a 1.5m LOC monster!Codethulu.

C#, trial by fire. 5 years later, I've got a solid handle on NET 2.0 C#. Now I'm learning lambdas and the new features in NET 3.5. Also trying to figure out threading and correct programming patterns.

Sadly, at my current job, we have a large number of dinosaurs who have not stayed current with technologies (COBOL, C, VB6, etc), so I don't have any mentors here, it's all self taught. All while trying to slowly bring Codethulu back into something manageable (See Stringly Typed). Now, I'm amazed at how BAD the code was that I've written in the past, and simply amazed at the fact that some of it worked.

I've fallen into every trap I can think of, premature optimization, pokemon exception handling, public variables, etc.You stop being a good programmer when you stop learning, and making mistakes are a big part of learning. I have a 3 year old boy now who has an aptitude for computers that floors me. He plays Spore!

Kids are absolute sponges for information, don't discourage a child from learning anything. He's fascinated when he catches me working from home, he knows that all those strange letters makes a program. He's also extremely interested in cooking, and gets upset if I don't let him help me in the kitchen.

I don't believe in steering a child to a particular field, rather find something they love to do and encourage them to continue it, whether it's culinary or computing! As long as they're happy, what else really matters? So, my story is something along the lines of Early fascination and encouraging relatives Learned QBasic & Hex editors HTML, CSS, JavaScript College - Java, Linux, shell C#, NET, etc.

My EvilBoy found that he loved to play computer games. Then starting wondering what was going on under the hood. Bruhahahha He started programming in Warcraft 3, moved in to JASS (Warcraft 3 assembler sort of) I have been broadening his horizons with C++ (yes yes, child abuse I know) He is using the free MSVC8, with the game library DarkGDK He is having a lot of fun.

I went through almost exactly the same sequence you did. GW to QBASIC + asm, to C, to C++. Nowadays there are cool things like alice.org/ to help get kids hooked on the C++rack.Hugo.

I'm under 25, but I first "discovered" programming in college - I'm going to answer anyway. In middle school and high school I did a lot of VBA in Excel and BASIC on my TI-83 without having even the slightest clue that that was what programming was. Finally, one of my college professors picked up on it and steered me towards CS.

I think this is an important question because there tends to be this assumption that great programmers started well before college, but in my experience not everybody has any exposure to it earlier than that. Maybe it would be good to think of ways to steer children without programmer parents towards it as well.

I'm 26, but I guess close enough for what you're asking, as I started learning computers when I was 12. My progression was something like the following: MS-DOS (starting with version 2.0 IIRC), BASIC, QBASIC, Turbo Pascal, HTML, VB4-6 and a bit of VBA, C++ with MFC, PHP, Javascript, CSS, Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Access) and database design, C# / VB.NET. In school, I also did bits and pieces of other languages as well: Turing, Java, SPARC assembly.

I've probably missed a few. To answer the question more directly, for those beginning today, I think a good place to jump in is with the web-based languages such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Those are pretty forgiving and suitable for learning, but you can also do really powerful stuff with them once you get into it.

I'm 26, so I guess I'm close enough in age. I learned basic DOS commands at 12. In high school I took an "advanced technology" class that maintained the school's website in MS Frontpage.

From there I learned how to write HTML and a bit of Javascript from scratch in Notepad. I also recall doing some very basic CGI scripting in Perl, but Perl never caught on with me. My pre-cal teacher in high school was an ex FORTRAN programmer, and he would let you use any programs you wrote yourself on tests.

We had a few days in class where he showed students how to do basic I/O programming on the TI-82/83, but I had a TI-89 and he (nicely) refused to show me how to write programs for it because it was not the approved calculator for the class. So - I write out all the functions I wanted to code. When the TI-89 manual didn't tell me what I wanted to know, I went to TI's website and found a rather large PDF file that documented language features not in the manual.

I had a week before the next big test, and by then I had a menu-driven app that had conditional logic and would ask for information only relevant to problem at hand and other information I provided. I ended up making an A on that test when I normally made low B's, so my teacher asked to see my program. I explained my whole process and let him test it - he was very impressed and told me it was the most complicated calculator program he ever saw from a student, and asked me if I would share what I created with the class.

He told me I would do well to study computer science in college. S mentoring was a large reason why I decided to go into software development. In college, I first learned QBasic and Access SQL/VBA programming.

After that I learned (in order of appearance) COBOL, C\C++, Java, VB6, Bash shell scripting, and IBM 8086 ASM. Of those, I still use VB6 and C\C++ and a tiny tiny bit of ASM.

Started with WATCOM Basic in my first year of I programmed a simple application that helped me keep track of sales for the day. After realizing computers could be used to automate tasks and perform the same action exactly the same way each time, I decided to pursue programming in more detail. I learned HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript within the next couple of years and started making small, project-related websites for school and fun.

This is when I made the move to Linux as my primary desktop OS. In my last couple years of I moved on to Python, some C++, and using databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. After that, it was all history.

C and Java in University along with Python, Bash, and various other languages and technologies.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.