How do you people know so much about coding?

[Kaido]

We had an old IBM running DOS growing up. I thought Qbasic was a game

 

[IronWing]

Originally posted by: Kaido
We had an old IBM running DOS growing up. I thought Qbasic was a game

Have a banana.

 

[ryan256]

I did C and FORTRAN during college and basic in middle school. Wish I had kept it up too. Now I'm a tech rather than a coder.

 

[nakedfrog]

Started with AppleBASIC and Logo when I was around seven. Moved on to C, Pascal, and VB in high school. I took every computer class my high school had to offer, then the teacher just had me and my friend teach ourselves C from a book and just made sure the program worked. And I had a period during the day where I could just sit on one of the two PCs in the school with internet access and dink around online, and fix whatever computer problems anyone in the school was having so the teacher could focus on his job. We also ran a Novell Netware server (Doom matches at lunch )

 

[Descartes]

The best developers I know almost always had some experience prior to school. Most of them fit the typical geek mold.

I started around 1992 (I was 12) doing Turbo Pascal 7, then Q/Power/BASIC, then finally C (DJGPP compiler at the time since it was free). C++ followed a few years later, then Visual Basic 4 (my first realization that I could actually create something useful to business) then all the web-related "languages" (JavaScript, CSS, HTML, etc.), various scripting languages (mostly Perl), then Java and finally C#. After you've spent enough time with languages, the actual implementation isn't really anything you think about. Most of my time is now spent with higher abstractions like methodology, best practices, architecture, project management, etc. The language itself is relegated to almost the status of a medium, similar perhaps to how a painter might look at a canvas. Higher-level languages like C# and Java affords us this.

 

[FoBoT]

do it
start early

i never "learned" programming in college
i learned to learn programming in jr high and high school and on my own

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: LoKe
I must have been late to the party. All these guys starting in their early teens. I didn't start leaning until I was about 16. I started with HTML, so that hardly counts, but introduced myself to PHP at 17 or so. That's a whole 3 years of programming for me.

If you were late, some of us are janitors cleaning up afterwards.

Programming became available in second year of college.
Anything learned earlier than that was use of relays, transistors and capacitors using breadboards.

 

[imported_LoKe]

Originally posted by: EagleKeeper

Originally posted by: LoKe
I must have been late to the party. All these guys starting in their early teens. I didn't start leaning until I was about 16. I started with HTML, so that hardly counts, but introduced myself to PHP at 17 or so. That's a whole 3 years of programming for me.

If you were late, some of us are janitors cleaning up afterwards.

:laugh:

 

[oboeguy]

I started at 8 years old. Mostly self-taught.

 

[seemingly random]

Some the most difficult developers I ever managed where very smart and had started coding in basic. One good thing about pascal was that it enforced structure - it's just not realistic in real world development. I've found that good, clever coders do not necessarily make good developers since coding is only part of the entire process.

 

[Linflas]

First time I ever programmed it was in BASIC using a teletype in a 1 semester class in my senior year of high school. I "saved" my programs on a punch tape. I never really messed with it again until I got out of the Navy and started college where I took BASIC for a semester and FORTRAN for a semester but by then I also had an ATARI 800 to mess with BASIC on as well. I ended up working as a FORTRAN programmer at Naval Research Lab for 5 years and took a couple of C classes at night. My programming days ended with that contract though when I moved into networking and support back at corporate but I still did some coding on the side for them to produce a monthly financial report.

 

[tfinch2]

Originally posted by: Canai
I went to Camp CAEN when I was in high school. That and a BASIC class taught me the logical structures needed, so now everything is kind of review.

Which sucks. I failed my CompSci class last semester because I never did any of the homework or went to class. Averaging over 100% on ALL the exams (including the final) didn't matter. Nope. Fuck the US educational system.

It's not the US education system's fault that you can't do your homework or go to class.

 

[alkemyst]

There are two schools...programmers and developers.

A programmer can be taught easily. You sit through classes and learn it.

A developer not so easily. You still usually have to take 'classes' perhaps self-taught.

For the most part like any profession you have those that have felt the drive since they were young and others that bought in late in life or just in it for a paycheck.

I am 36, when I was in elementary I would leave class and go into our computer room (apple ]['s) with a magazine of code and just mess around. Oddly no one ever questioned this. Did the same with shop and graphics class. In college I would go into labs too.

 

[TheVrolok]

Find something that interests you and work on it as a personal project. I started with LOGO/QBasic back in the day (probably when I was in 3-4th grade) moved on from there. Coded in C for a MUD in junior high, etc. Like most people are saying, most of us that can code without any formal education just taught ourselves. It's not too hard with the amount of help (tutorials, forums, snippets) that exist on the net.

 

[911paramedic]

I started with basic back on that little computer that you had to store memory on a cassette tape, don't even remember what it was called. Went off in a different direction for many years after that though. But I was using computers before windows, so batch commands and command line stuff was easy.

10 goto 20
20 print "Try (not programming, I know) creating a cross browser CSS page that works across all browsers, now thats talent! "
30 end

 

[Casawi]

You know some people are born to do anything else but programming. I don't think it has to do with your GPA or being smart at all, some just don't pick it up. Programming is definitely one of those things you learn by doing.

 

[Special K]

I think the first thing I ever attempted was programming games for a TI86 when I was in highschool. This was in 1999. There was no high level language for the calc at the time, which meant I had to learn Zilog assembly language. I eventually gave up due to a lack of documentation, but I did learn a lot of general programming constructs and principles from that experience.

 

[Martin]

Well, you don't need to have started early to code - I first learned in high school along with everyone else.

But if you want to become better, there's two things you should do:
- like others have mentioned, you have to learn by doing. So, pick a decent sized project that would be somewhat interesting and start doing it. If you need ideas, ATOT will be of some help.

- you have to always think about how to do things better. You always have to think how to structure things better, how to logically organize your code, which sections to abstract etc. This one is much harder and IMO, where the difference between good and bad programmers comes through.

 

[seemingly random]

In my little sample, the most difficult developers were high gpa, clock watchers. I got to the point where I had two main requirements with job candidates - native intelligence and desire - probably pretty non-standard interview techniques. The best developer I had was a chemical engineer who had never programmed until his late 20's. We put in 50-80 hour weeks - insane but fun.