I started with LOGO in the first grade( age 6 ), if that can be considered a programming language. I was poring over my dad's purple 8086 book by age 8 and writing some basic assembly programs.
Kids' minds are incredibly plastic. One year difference, given the wide variability of interest and abilities in a given population pool, kindergarten is not difficult to believe.
Technically I was exposed to Logo as a kid, but we never kept the computer in our classroom for long. My first exposure to Visual Basic was in 1997 for one semester(freshman in high school), and started seriously programming in C++ in 1999(start of senior year). I do mostly .Net now.. I still feel like I have a long way to go. I never knew how to get developer tools and good documentation till my last year of school. I wish I knew sooner.
I don't know how this came about, but my elementary school had (the gifted kids) programming in LOGO in 2nd and 3rd grades. It was never explained as computer programming, more like a game to make a turtle draw cool things.
I'd love to meet the school administrator who decided this was important and buy him or her a beer. It started my entire passion for computers and programming.
I was lucky enough that my grandparents bought me one of those computers that hooked up to my TV, and it had a BASIC interpreter on it. I still have the manual...
Same here, BASIC, 5 or 6. Text adventure games, lemonade stand, and so on.
Dijkstra says, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." But he complained about nearly everything.
1977, 6502 assembly language (hand assembled machine code really) on a KIM-1. 1k RAM, 6 digit 7 segment display and hex keypad. Still have that computer and it still works.
The usual answer to the date controversy is that since there wasn't a year 0, each decade must be 1-10, so the 10s start in 2011.
I'm comfortable with saying, instead, that the first decade had 9 years and the first century 99 years, and so on, but other people seem to object more. :)
Perhaps overly ironic given my pedantic tags before, but the year 0 issue is something where I see no point being technical. As far as the population of the world is concerned, 2000 was the start of the new millenium, etc.
Either way: while you can claim that 2011 is the start of the next decade, 2010 is definitively the start of "the 10s". I was born in `90, I would listen to an argument that I was born in the same decade as someone who was born in `85, but to say I was born in the eighties would be undeniably incorrect.
That is ridiculous. You can say that the the second decade of the 21st Century started in 2011... but to pretend that the 201x decade started in 2011 is not even wrong.
Like a few other posters here, I got my start in QBASIC (kids want instant visual feedback, and QBASIC certainly did that). Parents bought a computer, then forbid us to play anything resembling a game. So I wrote my own (and also discovered Gorillas). I think the first thing I built was a slot machine making use of random numbers.
It started as a game. We were reading about disassembling and competing was fun. Those were the days of +ORC reversing tutorials. I wanted to know how computers worked and discovering Linux was the next big step in that direction.
Later C,C++, python, objective C..., I think understanding what the computer does with every line gives you an advantage. Some things become obvious to you but not to other programmers without hard assembly experience.
All I wanted for my seventh birthday was a computer. My parents got me a second hand ZX81 which came with an excellent user manual [1] which was mainly a tutorial for programming in BASIC.
My Dad got me a ahem pirated copy of visual basic 6 when I was about 14 in 00/01
While I'd hate to develop anything in VB these days, it did kick off my interest in software development. Especially when my friend was into it as well so we'd make stuff and share it with each other.
Java developer by trade these days, and I use Ruby or Objective-C for personal development.
Not to pile on the guilt, but I swept yards when I was 11 to raise the money to buy Visual Basic for DOS 1.0 when it came out ;-) Unfortunately, the joke was entirely on me in the end!
I also got VB4-6 pirated somewhere around 1998. My dad got me to read a book on VB4 and down the rabbit hole I went (I had dabbled before, but just scripting apps like mIRC and a few DOS batch files).
I started tinkering with programming in the 80s (Vic20, Commodore64, AtariST), but didn't get into it seriously or for work (Assembly, C, C++, Pascal, Java) until the early 90s.
1975 in BASIC on Dartmouth College's time sharing system. I was 13 at the time and the local schools had installed a handful of mechanical teletypes (chukka chukka chukka chukka ding chukka...). It was a beautiful thing!
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 87.1 ms ] threadI received my Commodore VIC-20 when I was 11 years old. :-D
http://www.dcs-media.com/Archive/20-20-top-20-programming-le...
I started at 7, and I though that was on the early side.
I started with LOGO in the first grade( age 6 ), if that can be considered a programming language. I was poring over my dad's purple 8086 book by age 8 and writing some basic assembly programs.
Kids' minds are incredibly plastic. One year difference, given the wide variability of interest and abilities in a given population pool, kindergarten is not difficult to believe.
I'd love to meet the school administrator who decided this was important and buy him or her a beer. It started my entire passion for computers and programming.
I was lucky enough that my grandparents bought me one of those computers that hooked up to my TV, and it had a BASIC interpreter on it. I still have the manual...
I attribute my code reading abilities to navigating my own GOTO spaghetti while trying to recreate ZORK.
Dijkstra says, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." But he complained about nearly everything.
There shouldn't be an apostrophe between the number and the 's'.
"Will learn in the 10s" should just be "10s", as some people may have already started programming in the past 12 months
</pedantic>
I'm comfortable with saying, instead, that the first decade had 9 years and the first century 99 years, and so on, but other people seem to object more. :)
Either way: while you can claim that 2011 is the start of the next decade, 2010 is definitively the start of "the 10s". I was born in `90, I would listen to an argument that I was born in the same decade as someone who was born in `85, but to say I was born in the eighties would be undeniably incorrect.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ComputesGazetteProgramPage...
Later C,C++, python, objective C..., I think understanding what the computer does with every line gives you an advantage. Some things become obvious to you but not to other programmers without hard assembly experience.
[1] http://web.ukonline.co.uk/sinclair.zx81/
While I'd hate to develop anything in VB these days, it did kick off my interest in software development. Especially when my friend was into it as well so we'd make stuff and share it with each other.
Java developer by trade these days, and I use Ruby or Objective-C for personal development.