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Discussion on: How did you get into programming in the first place?

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Dustin King

My dad had a Commodore 64 when I was little. He wrote programs, such as simple educational games for us kids. He showed me how BASIC worked, and we wrote a program together to count to a million. Later, he got me a book on QBasic, which I experimented with during high school. The first thing I tried to do on my own was writing an equation solver (I don't think it worked out very well because I was confused about the difference between equality and assignment). I also looked at the source code for some games to try and understand how they worked.

At that point I knew about variables, control flow, etc, but I didn't really learn how to write programs until I took intro to programming in college. Having an actual assignment (writing a program to make change for a given amount of money) plus a good chapter on techniques for breaking down a problem and designing a program for it in the book for the course ("Programming and Problem Solving with Ada"), really helped, and I consider this the point when I really became a programmer.

I also remember an epiphany when I was in junior high or high school, when I realized "Game Genie uses Peek and Poke commands!" (Although that may not be literally true, because it was probably assembly instead of BASIC.)