Ask HN: How many of you HNers learned to program for the first time in college?

5 points by curious16 ↗ HN
What was the experience like good and bad both? What was your first language? Would you have changed something if you were given another chance at life?

4 comments

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Not me: I learned (FORTRAN, BASIC, Z80/6502 ASM) at home while still at school (70s/80s).
It doesn’t matter when you first learn because once you start, if you like it, you’ll never stop.

I learned to program BASIC in 3rd grade and C in 7th grade. Then FORTRAN and PASCAL in college (Mechanical Engineering). Then C++, Lisp and C# at my first job. Then PHP and SQL, and later Python. Somewhere in there I learned assembler for x86 and some microcontrollers. I learned Java just so I could teach it as a volunteer APCS teacher.

Just start; that’s the key.

My first year University course advisor suggested I do the brand new Pascal programming course in ‘79.

They enrolled a couple of hundred students but only had 5 card punch machines and one reader. One month of 24/7 programming by trial and error, which the lecturers wanted to avoid, only two machines survived, one had a broken ‘b’ key.

This set me up for future success as future 1980’s employers always got the young bloke to run the computer.

I practice, yes. Real learning came when need to do something real came up. 'You, summer student, Do this for 2k rows.'