Young Coders!

[Bluspacecow]

Originally Posted by Cralor Who says I'm not 43?

Your wife when you ask for Ice cream for the 3rd time on a long cross country road trip.

or asks to go to the bathroom 5 mins after leaving a service station ...
or asks "are we there yet ?" for the 34789 time

*ducks*

[Taryble]

I started teaching myself BASIC around '84 or '85. On a RadioShack CoCo that my uncle had given me, when I was in 1st grade. Kept it up until '87, then that computer died. In '90 or '91 I got a Commodore 64, and started in again with BASIC once more. Then I got a Packard Bell 386 in '92. QBasic, and some Pascal. More Pascal as I got into high school, and C++ in junior college in '96. :> Yes, I'm 30, and I've been programming since I was 5 or 6. Oddly enough, I'm not a programmer - I work in the hospitality industry, when I work.

[Throrik]

Started HTML when I was 11, then just progressed with Web languages, CSS, Javascript, PHP, SQL and then got into C/C++, C# and didn't look back.

[nightcracker]

I've just become 15 YAAAAY!

[Ferous]

Originally Posted by nightcracker I've just become 15 YAAAAY!

Is your birthday today? Today is my birthday as well, although I am 25

[Wimpface]

I'm 16, though I started at 14.

I came in contact with this because I got tired of looking for addons for hours straight. So I decided to write my own. Though I've dropped Lua now and went on to HTML/CSS/php.

[Cralor]

Originally Posted by nightcracker I've just become 15 YAAAAY!

Happy birthday

Nice to see more young coders! At this point I am continuing on with Lua and getting into Java.

[Kamakazi911]

I'm 16 and have dabbled In HTML
Eventually I'll break and write my own Lua addons, but for now I'm content with using other peoples and editing it to do what I want

[Xrystal]

Originally Posted by Kamakazi911 I'm 16 and have dabbled In HTML Eventually I'll break and write my own Lua addons, but for now I'm content with using other peoples and editing it to do what I want

Thats how most of us started out if not all of us

[Verissi]

Originally Posted by Xrystal Thats how most of us started out if not all of us

^^ This, especially when it comes to addons. Most of the career programmers that I've met started out by monkeying with other people's code, then moved on to write their own once they were comfortable and confident enough to do so.

As for me, I started writing code right after I turned 7 years old...on punch cards I initially tinkered with disassembled game code on a mainframe (we didn't have many games back then) to try to "beat" a specific game, then just kept going after that. Before I knew it, I was writing programs to make an entire lab of minicomputers all play "Flight of the Bumble Bee" at the same time on their "trouble alert buzzers"...which earned me a lovely ban from that lab

Now that I'm orbiting 40, I still love tinkering with other people's code as much as writing my own. 16+ languages in my skull, countless lines of code written, and a variety of application genres (game addons to kernel code to server firmware) under my belt and I still enjoy it. Personally, I was always a "take it apart and see how it works" type, so it fits well for me (probably why I'm considering going back to school to study physics and mathematics *grins*).

It's very much a creative enterprise and I'm always thrilled to see other people attracted to it at a younger age like I was. In my opinion, it's a great outlet for energy and creativity that can turn into a solid career in the future, if you choose to go that route and enjoy it.

Well I know the thread is titled young coders, and though I'm not the oldest in here I'm far from the youngest.

I started out with this lovely little thing:



Oh yeah, Sinclair ZX81. At the time, you purchased it as a kit that you had to solder together yourself. My mom later got me the 16kb memory expansion for it. It had its' own weird version of a BASIC interpreter, and recorded programs onto regular audio cassettes. It was, in short, an absolute piece of crap...but at the time I really enjoyed it.

However, the thing that changed everything for me was when my grandparents pooled some money together and got me what is still to-date the best present I have ever received in my life:



I still have two of these with all original cables, two 5.25" FDDs, a Datasette, and a fast-load cartridge...in full working condition 27 years after they were released. Now that's quality control!

Sadly, after that is when IBM took over the market. I still occasionally bust out one of my C64s and rock some Choplifter, though. (lol)

[Tandurin]

I think it's fair for me to say I'm the latest coder in this thread.

I am under the age of 20 and started coding yesterday.

[Aesh]

i am not too young
36 old on ages - but still feel myself young padawan
Start learning just for learn something interesting.
found a new universe
And becomes to hobby , very interesting thingy.
I love it.

[Soeters]

I'm 17 and I think I started coding when I was 15.
I started with Lua, and from then, I started learning Python, Perl, some batch in Linux.

What gave me the love of coding is modify rMinimap

[xConStruct]

I'm 19 and I started coding around 12-14.

My first experiences were made with HTML and messing around with the PHP-code of some forum softwares. Then we got a programmable Casio graphics calculator for school and I've written some games on it (it was some kind of BASIC) ... well, atleast I did it as long as the memory wasn't full :/

My father gave me a little insight in Visual C++ and Java, but I found it too difficult at the first time, so I moved back to web design - this time more in CSS, JavaScript and my own PHP-projects with MySQL.

Then came the WoW addon-time, learning Lua and bypassing XML. Got into version control through this (yay!), first SVN, then Git. Besides, I went to computer science lessions in school, starting with Delphi and later VB.Net.
About one year ago I moved to Linux and since then I'm loving it. The whole commandline-stuff is a lot of fun (using Bash btw ) and I started to make a return to C++ - this time under the QT-Framework which has one of the best documentations I've ever seen.
In the recent times, I got in touch with Ruby a little, because I'm looking for an easy interpreted high-level programming language for small scripts.
And Java made its comeback, too - but only because I found my old LEGO Mindstorms robotics-set and tried to program it in leJOS.

All in all, I'm most active in these:
XHTML & CSS, C++ & QT and Lua, of course

[Sythalin]

QBASIC -> HTML -> CSS -> some Javascript -> LUA

Started out writing programs the long way for my T-86 for math, which escalated to games:

Blackjack
health tracker for 6 playing Magic: The Gathering
LARP character sheets

All handdrawn dot by dot....

Decided to try HTML, got quite involved. Started to wonder if there was a more organized way to do things, which lead to my discovery of CSS. And of course I started to want to do nifty stuff, so I learned some JS bits. Started playing WoW and decided to try my hand at "real" coding (term used loosely) and found I quite enjoyed it. 28 years later since that painful night for my mother, although later than most, I've found a hobby that I enjoy and turning it into a career....

End of first term at the end of this month and got my CIW internet certification already.

[zero-kill]

I'm over 20 and started coding when I was a few years under 20. I started with a different approach, mostly desktop application development creating interesting schemes in Excel and Access, eventually going over to VBasic, haven't done much since high school, I'll be attending university eventually for Physics so maybe I'll climb back on at some point.