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Discussion on: Why did you start programming?

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Donald

Wow, I'm surprised by all the responses. I am going to put it into a future post, but I'll answer my own question.

My dad (and later I) worked at IBM, so I've always had access to technology. I had a PC in the mid-90s with Windows 95 and a book on C, and since I knew most PC games used C++, I read through the book to learn how to program in an IDE. My science fair project was probably the first computer science project that year--a text-based game.

A year later, my 5th grade teacher was learning HTML, and as the editor of the school newspaper, he forced me (at my mom's insistence) to write a tutorial on making websites. I started web development 6 or 7 years later when I had a server to play with.

This month I've taken a hiatus from programming, so the most technical I am today is either doing computation finance in R or helping with programming homework.