Oof…

I pick up Dark Basic when I was in Fourth Grade. It goes from Dark Basic -> Dark Basic Professional -> C# -> Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, C/C++, DLang, Rust, and so forth.

I mainly program in C now.

TI-83 graphing calculator in high school, around 1998. I would sit there in math class coding games in Basic. Ended up developing a reputation as the guy you went to if you needed a program to cheat on a math test.

The highlight of the entire endeavor was a class wherein the teacher announced that before a test, they’d be resetting the memory on everyone’s graphing calculators, to prevent cheating. I wasn’t planning to cheat, but I did have a few games I was working on, and I didn’t want to lose them, so I wrote a program that emulated the graphing calculator’s interface, and would let you go through all of the steps to reset the memory, including showing the Programs menu as being empty afterwards, while not actually resetting anything.

I showed this to the teacher just before the test (demonstrated “resetting the memory” with the program running, then demonstrated that the memory was in fact not reset), and he backed off from the compulsory reset policy in favor of the honor system, because he conceded that he wouldn’t be able to verify that the memory was actually reset anyway. Made me feel like an absolute hero.

It’s honestly funny because I learned the concepts in the math classes a lot better as a result of this - it took a very thorough understanding of how to use a concept to write a program to solve it for you.

Minecraft plugins, a very fun way to learn Java

Back then, when you wanted some new games you could:

• buy them (over expensive)
• trade some on cassette tapes at the schoolyard
• Go to the library, grab some source code books, have fun programming them

Wrote my own text-adventure when I was 10, since then I came across Basic, Turbo Pascal, JS, Java, AS, Lua, Python, C++, maybe some more 😵‍💫

Growing up in the 90s, I watched my father work with computers in the US Air Force. In 2001 he gave my brothers and I an HTML book and stated that “With this and Notepad you can write your own websites”. We proceeded to tear that book apart and each of us had a web site on our Windows 98 SE computers that were networked together and thus had our sites linked together. Nothing spectacular but it was fun.

I wish now that I had spent more time on the javascript side of the book as I am still pretty weak with JS.

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When I was 9 I started using “Cheat’o’matic” to have infinite health in Diablo 1 in the late 90s and it got me really interested in how computers work. I bought a kid-oriented book that taught Turbo Pascal and it showed some cool algorithms to draw spirographs and I enjoyed tinkering with it. From there I got to Delphi. At that point I was playing some online games and heard that they were written in PHP so I started learning that along with HTML. Then C, x86 ASM (just basics), and Flash’s ActionScript, Visual Basic, C++, Java, Python, and now Rust.

I got my PhD in computer security and have been working in Cyber R&D doing automated binary analysis.

Fun fact the author of Cheat’o’Matic now works on VAC anti-cheating system

In 2021, I had the same thought as you. Thought websites were cool so learned HTML, then the rest. Went to night college until about a week ago studying web dev and mobile dev.

I got recruited into a company about a year ago now (during college) and have been an employed Front-end developer ever since.

It’s a silly reason for my case. When I was like 11, I watched so many hacker movies and was like “damn this is cool, I want to be like them” so I dug through the path of “how to become a hacker” and saw that I need to know the program before trying to hack it. Tried learning C but failed because my monkey brain can’t handle all that. So I ended up writing random bash and python scripts since that time.

I was forced to learn HTML as a 9-year-old so I could make sick Pet Pages on Neopets and show off to all my Neofriends.

<embed src=“GhostBusters.mid” autostart=“true”>

I don’t really remember what made me start but I do remember my first project being a hilariously bad c++ blackjack game, all spaghetti code. Also learned a lot by building Minecraft redstone circuits. I remember building a thing that sent a piece of data over a single redstone wire and stored it in redstone memory, I was so proud of myself for figuring it out lol

Did a little java to make Minecraft mods but eventually I stumbled on python and it stuck bc it was so easy to use.

When I was young I always thought programming was mind-bogglingly complex, that I’d never be able to do it, I wrote it off. In school I took IT classes because I was good with computers but they never had any programming so I wasn’t exposed to that until I started a computer science degree. There I did my first programming course where I was gently introduced using Windows Forms and C# and was immediately hooked, right after class I went home and started making my own silly Windows Forms apps

Copied basic code out of computer magazines, read a DOS 3.1 book cover to cover in the 80s as a kid. Just always drawn to it. Today I wrote some bicep code to allow my dev team to access the key vault in the lower environments but not the upper. I’ve done Vb6, flash actionscript, objective c, Java, C#, python, C++, SQL, ruby, spingboot, jquery, angular, react, Perl, PHP, VBA, Foxpro, T-SQL, and many other languages.

It’s still fun.

I started a WoW guild in 2007, and installed a basic phpbb forum. But that was too generic for my liking, and I had a grand vision of setting ourselves apart via an awesome website built off the back of the forum login system.

What was I going to do? Pay an expert to do a proper job? With my money?

So that’s how I got into PHP, and HTML /CSS, and everything since has just spiraled from there.

And yes, one of the first guild applications we got through my swanky new system failed because of an apostrophe. But this is how we learn!

Took a random programming fundamentals course in college. The rest is the rest