DEV Community

Nick Karnik
Nick Karnik

Posted on

Poll: How old were you when you started to learn programming?

I would like to know when you first started to learn programming, how old you were, and what your first programming language was.

Please take a short survey via Google Forms. I will post the stats overlaying the three data points when responses are closed.

You can share the link above or retweet:

Liquid error: internal

This is a variation of the poll that Sara Chipps created:

After our exchanges:

Top comments (6)

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I didn't get serious about software development until much later, but Geocities was my intro to the craft when I was around 13.

Collapse
 
alephnaught2tog profile image
Max Cerrina • Edited

Classy construction gif

Fancy fire  gif

Collapse
 
theoutlander profile image
Nick Karnik

Woot! Good old Geocities!

In case anyone is on a quest to excavate their site off Geocities, here's the archive: oocities.org/. Sadly, I can't recall my username :|.

Collapse
 
jfrankcarr profile image
Frank Carr

I guess it depends on what exactly you would define as "coding".

The first programs I wrote were in an Introduction to Computer Science class I took in college in 1978 when I was 20. They were in BASIC and Fortran and ran on a Control Data Cyber mainframe timeshare. I also got to write some Apple BASIC programs on the school's Apple II computer.

However, about 10 years before that, I learned how to use a slide rule, a type of mechanical analog computer. (There was a little thing called the "space race" on at that time and I was really into it.) So, that might be considered where I first learned to code.

Collapse
 
niorad profile image
Antonio Radovcic

Coded some basic QBasic/VB/HTML in the late 90ties (~13 y.o.).
Then lots of years I stopped pursuing it, since I thought you need to be good at math, which I wasn't.
Then in Uni while studying Design we did lots of projects with Java/Processing, which got the coding started again (~26 y.o.).
But it wasn't until 28ish, when I really began to learn "proper" (as in JS) programming at my job, as just HTML/CSS wasn't sufficient anymore.

Collapse
 
coolgoose profile image
Alexandru Bucur

I think my 'real' script was when I was around 15-16 years old and I started coding a small python game with an online friend for a while.
Until then I played with a lot of random PHP cms's and did some HTML work here and there (long live IE 6 our true lord and master)