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How old were you when you wrote your first line of code?

Florin Pop on June 13, 2019

And maybe tell us what you wrote? 😃

I started at around 15-16 in High School and if I remember correctly it was a little bit of HTML that we wrote 😊

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Robert Sweetman

I was 44. Three years later I'm learning Javascript and Rust.

Started by adding Powershell Write-Host statements to the QA automation so when it barfed we'd at least have a clue as to which part of the script(s) to fix.

Then progressed to automating virtual machine setups using Powershell, Terraform, Ansible and the various cloud CLI's.

If anyone's reading these replies and thinking "everyone answering was in their teens when they started, I'm screwed" take heart. I thought only super intelligent people with some sort of special gift for maths could be programmers... I did an art degree ;)

Turns out it's like everything else. Be genuinely interested in the topic, have a need to get something done and PRACTICE.

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Jonathan Kuhl

14-15. It was a language called C-Script. C-Script was a scripting language built for A4 3d GameStudio made by some German company. I tried to make video games back in the day and realized how much of a chore that really is.

C-Script later got replaced by Lite-C, a super set or maybe a library (not sure how exactly it worked) of C++. Lite-C you could write any valid C++ as well as Gamestudio's own library of code (so maybe it was a superset like Typescript is to JavaScript, I don't remember.)

Haven't touched it in years though. I have Unity and I know C# but I haven't gotten back into game dev, simply because I remember how much work it was.

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Antonio Radovcic

QBasic at 11 or 12 I guess.
I started by modifying Textadventures and did all kinds of BEEP-stuff with the piezo-speaker. The most "complex" thing I started was what today is called a "Rougelike". I could control a figure and it even had a second room :-3

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Alex Friedman

12 QBasic. I wrote a program that would randomly draw lines of varying sizes and colors on screen. I also remember combing through the source code to the Gorillas game and just copying and pasting various snippets to try and figure out what they do. Fast forward 25 years, and I still find myself copying and pasting various snippets of code to try and figure out what they do 😆

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Antonio Radovcic

Hehe did you also at some point just draw random points on the screen and discovered that it’s not really random?

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Saul Costa

8 or 9.

I'd wanted video games to play, but my parents were pretty strict, so instead of letting me get e.g. Age of Empires, my dad handed me a floppy disk with a bunch of QBASIC games on it and told me "if you want to play video games so badly, build your own".

I spent a lot of time reverse engineering the games, which back then was easier IMO since the source code was immediately available when you started the game. Then I started by modifying the existing games, then slowly building my own (mostly text based) games.

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Luigui Moreno

23, sure I had written code before to courses in college, but when I start programming for the sake of programming I was 23 YO, I remember the I started reading a "For Dummies" book about css, html and javascript, that also happens to have php included great book at the time by Andy Harris

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Vicente G. Reyes • Edited

I was 17 or 18 and was in college. First language was Turbo C(2008); then I forgot everything. Fast forward to today, first program I wrote was a Twitter Bot in Python.

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Florin Pop

What does the Twitter Bot do? 😃

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Vicente G. Reyes

It tweets jokes from the icanhazdadjoke api hahaha

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lucsan

🐣 12 years old on a Z80 using assembly, we would identify the error message buffers and insert rude words.

We had to load the OS every time from a cassette tape (a last century method of transporting sound information)

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Thomas H Jones II

Good times. I learnt 6502 assembler because programs I'd write for my Apple ][ were too stupidly slow in pretty much any other higher-level language.

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Brad

I was in middle school programming what I thought was the only way.

using batch files, GOTOS, help, and pure trial and error on windows xp

  • I didn't have access to the internet, or know what I would even search for on ask.com
  • I didn't know what "programming" was. I thought I was doing hacking 😎
  • I spent a full week figuring out the correct syntax to get user input
  • I tried every single command available to CMD and read every single help output for each command.

I ended up making a simple math games, random scripts that made it look like I was actually hacking (fake blue screens of deaths), changing the CMD thru rainbox colors, play Star wars thru telnet, etc.

It wasn't until college I realized I had no idea what I was doing at the time 😄 but the experience did give me a good idea that I'd go into "Computer Science" when I got older haha

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Florin Pop

Wow! This is a very interesting story! #MrRobot 😁

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Corey McCormick

I believe I was around 9 or 10 when I discovered Microsoft Front Page on a Windows 95 machine. One of my first projects was just a simple HTML website that linked a bunch of search engine and gaming sites together.

O how I wish I had a copy of the small projects I made. Would be fun to compare and look at now.

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Florin Pop

Yup, it really would be fun!! ☺️

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Toby Worth • Edited

I was 10. I was coding a game from a book on the ZX81. I had to use a 16Kb RAM pack to allow me to write all teh codez. I think it was about 2 or 3Kb in total, but the base RAM was 1Kb or something. Anyway, it took me about 4 hours. The keyboard was soo finnicky, it was mostly debugging... XD

All it did was create a 'valley' of spaced 'I' characters that descended down the screen towards your avatar (an 'H') and you had to steer left and right to get further up the valley as it narrowed every 10 steps or so. There were millions of these games, but it all boiled down to this basic dynamic.

It ran like an LCD word processor, but it was my first game! Unfortunately, since there was no tape backup, that night I lost it all because the RAM pack had to be returned to the owner. 'Death Valley 3000' was early vapourware! :D

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Jeremy Grifski

I have no clue. If I had to guess, probably around the MySpace/Neopets era so early teens. I remember playing around with image tiling and music players.

I wasn’t formally taught until college though.

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Victor Homem Heck

i think at 9 i had contact with html and frontpage, but it was copy and paste
at 15-16 i learned Pascal at Highschool, but didn't learn much.
At 17 my cousin passed me a challenge, if i could send a snake game made by me to him, he would pass me a copy of L4D2.
while learning how to code, i was making a bad Rpg game, and forgot about the L4D2 and was just enjoying coding things :D

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Andreas Jakof

I was 7, when my father bought an Atari 800XL. We were copy coding a Math game and modifying it afterwards in BASIC.

After that I was using the scripting language on the Comodore Amiga 500 and started Turbo Pascal 7.0 in school at the age of 12 and decided I want to do that when I am grown up and earn my living with it.

I started C++ in 2010 and C# in 2011, which stuck with me since then. Currently I am dabbeling in F#, but not enough yet to make bigger projects with it.

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Damola Adekoya

17 years old.... It was HTML back then... That was my first year at uni... I couldn't sleep.. I learnt all HTML tag I could find back then... I ended up creating login and registration page... Without CSS

🤦🤦🤦

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Lukas Derksen

I first dabbled in HTML when I was 11/12-ish I think. My mom had gotten a course from her job and I found it, so I started to learn it a bit. Although I understood the concepts, it wasn't until much later that I could create something worth looking at (and I'm talking when I was 17 in college and finally bothered figuring out how to get CSS to work). Fast-forward to now, 5 years later, I am finally confident about my ability to create pretty neat front-ends for the web apps I write at work without the use of GUI frameworks, so pretty proud of that progress.

Also, in highschool at 14-ish I was introduced to Java at our IT class. We got a course and had to write some simple programs, but it got me started on thinking like a programmer. I wasn't very good at it starting out. I remember my teacher telling me "programming isn't really for you, now, is it?". Still get a good laugh about that, knowing I am now a professional developer.

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Florin Pop

That’s a very nice story!!

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Thomas H Jones II

Six or seven ...now forty-plus years ago. I was interested in computer graphics. However, in the late 70s, doing graphics meant learning how to bang-out machine-code. Even then, the results suuuuuuuuucked.

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Florin Pop

Heh!

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Nucu Labs

When I wrote my first line of code I was around 12 years old, I was using a Sony Ericsson k300i mobile phone and I copied some Javascript from some Webmaster's page on paper and then transcribed it to my website which was built using a platform that gave you a subdomain and let you html and Javascript. The Javascript greeted the user by displaying an alert taking into account the current time of the day.

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Brian Hanna

I was probably 11 or 12? And it was either JavaScript or ActionScript, I'm not 100% sure, but it was some variation of ECMAScript, either 2 or 3. Either way, that pays my bills now, so good job pre-teen me!

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Omar Sinan

Lua at 11-12 years old. I used to develop games on a game platform called Roblox. Started off by making an RPG game called “Legend of the Fire Swords”. Kept creating games up until i was around 16-17 and then moved on to app development with Swift :D

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Karolis

Can't remember but probably 11-12 in school had to write pascal :) the first useful code for me was probably world of warcraft macros in Lua :D at that time I didn't even know it was Lua or that I was coding, just building up on other examples and getting some cool feral druid functionality such as changing skills based on shape (bear, lion) and how many types enemy was hit. You could do pretty cool stuff there :)

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Joshua Ghali

If coding on a TI-83 counts then I was 16.

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Steffen Pedersen

I was around 10 years old 😃 In Denmark we had a social media called Arto. Here we could customize the profile text with HTML and inline styling 😎 I didn't really catch up until my early 20s.

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Debashis Dip

I think it was around 15-16 as well, It was some visual basic 6 codes, the goal was to build a 3rd party UI interface for a popular chatting platform with some additional (might call abusive) features.

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axhom

6, i accidentally wrote a Shellscript,I intended to just write a list of Games I liked to play and it just said "this file is executable, do you like to execute it?", and I asked my father (who is a IT professor) and since then I liked coding.

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Nam V. Do

This was the break before I were in the final year on high school. Up to this point it is approximately 2 years. From the very first time I approached Python at first then I switch to JavaScript until now. And also have a blog. And suddenly now I come up with a question that takes me a long time but still cannot get it totally, what exactly float point number do?

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ZumDeWald

I was 15 and in high school. I had a few friends exploring HTML and learned the basics of turning a txt file into a website. However, I fell off the wagon when they got into JavaScript and CSS!

Glad to have found my way back to it all these years later.

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Kirii

I started in middleschool. There was a after school program for students with a local company to teach them about technology. We programmed on a IBM-Machine called AS/400 in a language called CL. After that i got hungry for more and started copying batch script from the internet and trying them out and i felt like an "hacker".The script where mostly just launching and immense amount of windows or shuting down the pc.

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adro.codes

Around 15, building a gardening game in Game Maker.

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Ross

Gradually between the ages of 5-10 with Sinclair BASIC in the late 80s then later some Z80 assembly. First one was probably the hangman example in the ZX Spectrum manual.

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Nicola Erario

My very first line of code was in 1986 (I was 6 yo) on my C16. I adapted a listing found in a magazine (those with cassette) to calculate the triangle geometry with BASIC language.

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Antti Pihlaja • Edited

We had a couple of hours of programming at school when I was about 14. It was Visual Basic. I don't remember what our exercise was but I remember we were building some forms and then copying code from images. Especially I remember the part that our teacher gave all code samples as images to prevent copy-paste :-)

A couple of years later, I began actual programming by scripting Excel using VBA in some hobby projects.

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Mathilde

Around 14 years old I did the HTML/CSS course on Openclassroom (it wasn't named like that at this time)

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Bertil Muth

I was 10, and I wrote this in BASIC on a C16:

10 PRINT “HALLO”
20 GOTO 10

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Sascha Manns

I also begun when i was 10. I started on a C64 with BASIC.

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Desolo Sub Humus 🌎🌍

Well, if I count the funny matching game I played that made games work on ye ol' TI-99 (Fortran), I'd say about 4. I forgot what I'd learned fairly quick, and honestly, it was before I went into school and learned how to read.

My family didn't have that computer for terribly long, so it was a long while later when I learned HTML and started writing code seriously - I'd say around 25 or 26. Since then, I've picked up CSS and started dabbling with JavaScript.

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Tyler McGinnis

22 🙂

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Dirty-Co.de

14 years old, some lines of code in QBasic including triggering a beep - it was awesome :).
Then everything turned to start again with HTML ;)

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Fulton Browne

9 or 10 i figured out i could make a file in notepad add .HTML and it was a program. i just kinda made random stuff. now i make android apps.

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Peter Thaleikis 🍪

Around 12 or 13: "Hello World" in C :)

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SD

QBASIC at 13. I wondered why the line numbers were 10,20,30 rather than 1,2,3

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Gabriel Laroche • Edited

I was about 15 years old, I started learning HTML and CSS with codecademy and I fell in love with coding right away!

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anpos231

8.
It was some bash script that displayed random stuff (A.K.A matrix)
It all started from there.

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Mohammadjavad Raadi

I was 15 in High School. I started with Pascal and then Basic.

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C.S. Rhymes

Does writing a sentence with the format ‘if this then that’ count as I’m sure most kids write that at school at some point without even realising its basic code.

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Florin Pop

I guess it counts! :P

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michelemauro

Hmm... must have been 10-12. My uncle had an Apple ][ with UCSD Pascal. Spectacular IDE. I think I learned english on those manuals...

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Alexis Rondón • Edited

Around 17-18, first year of college,

With Pascal

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Georgia

20! I only started a month ago and have been playing with HTML and CSS ever since. I love it! Looking to move onto JavaSript and then eventually ReactJS in the coming weeks/months.

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Florin Pop

Awesome!! Keep it going!

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Jake Varness

19 I think?

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Arnyminer Z

Maybe 11-12, in school, just trying to get started. Wrote some batch for some testing code.

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Vaibhav Namburi • Edited

Seventeen.Good mate C++

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Tadeo Rivera-Pineda

I started at 7 using Commodore Vic 20 Basic

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Maximilian Berkmann • Edited

~14 using Batch.

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Jess Lee

My first real line of code? 27

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jesús gollonet • Edited

22 And I mean I started learning to code at that age, right after finishing my degree in psychology. I had never been interested in computers before then.

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Florin Pop

That's an interesting switch 😃. Nice!

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Tamara Temple • Edited

I was 11. In 1969. A "Lunar Lander" game in the basic that ran on HP2000's, via a cranky teletype. Saved on punched paper tape. Used up rolls and rolls of teletype paper.

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Quintus Cardozo • Edited

Learned python at University with I was 18. Built a web new scraper with GUI.

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Bala Hantsi 🇳🇬
  1. QBasic in college
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Florin Pop

1??

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Andy Haskell

15 writing ActionScript to make a mini JRPG in Flash. No idea what any of the programming concepts were!

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John Thompson

I was 13 years old. The language was FORTRAN, and I wrote it on Hollerith cards using a keypunch machine. .... yeah, old school!

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Wachira

13 is when I wrote my first python code😁. It was a hello world then I made a command line calculator, until later I created one with a UI using Tkinter library

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Mateus Canello Ottoni

12-14, I think. VB.Net.
Judge me.
I regret nothing.

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Victor Edier

19 years old, a language called SEU, that did not had functions

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Avalander

I must have been 15-16 when I wrote my first line of Python. I just took a book on learning to program in Python, and I didn't code anything cool or fancy for years.

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Rajakumar

i was 13(2008) when i wrote first line :P i did a photo gallery in Html, css, js.
also started programming in java... to be honest the java part is tough as hell for me at that time... :)

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Daniel Schulz

13 or 14, trying to get a hold of DHTML

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Nicolas Antinori

I think I was 11. The first language I ever came in contact with was mIRC Scripting language :).

I found an amazing community that helped me out a lot in the beginning.