

How did you learn to program? - jlees
http://ilearnedtoprogram.com/

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DennisP
One day my dad brought home a reference manual for TRS-80 BASIC. It had all
the statements in alphabetical order. I read it front to back and spent a
couple years scrawling programs on paper, until finally the IBM PC was
introduced and he bought one. I wrote a bunch of BASICA programs, including
half a text adventure in a horrible mess of spaghetti. I spent hours with
printouts spread across the floor, tracking bugs through thickets of GOTOs.

Then Dad got Turbo Pascal and I discovered the joys of structured programming.
For my first project I wrote Conway's Life, and was shocked when it worked
perfectly the first time. I never wrote another line of BASICA.

I went to college, thought I didn't want to program for a living and got a
degree in anthropology. A few years later I had all kinds of crazy ideas for
software running around in my head, plus I was tired of being broke. I bought
a machine and some books, learned sql and classic asp, and got a job easily
because it was the height of the dotcom boom.

After a few years I discovered that writing endless data entry screens wasn't
that exciting, and started learning some real computer science. Still working
on that.

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wladimir
My dad bought an MSX computer and some programming manuals when I was a young
boy. I liked it more than him :) started with just typing over listings from
the books and magazines (that was common back then).

Later on I started changing things and trying what would happen. And trying to
make games do different things. And wrote quite some programs on my own, like
simple games, but soon found what you could do with BASIC was quite limited.
But it was kind of the only choice back then, apart from assembly. Somewhat
after that I started learning some Z80 assembly from a little book of opcodes.

Much later we got an MSX2, then an Atari ST, then finally a PC (286), man
those were crappy compared to the ST :) I learned Pascal using Turbo Pascal,
then C using Turbo C (Borland was big back then and everything was Turbo).
Learned a lot from other BBS users and TXTfiles.

I get very nostalgic when I think about these things.

