Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

No one I knew could program. Very few people I knew even knew what a computer was. When I was 16, based on things I'd read, I designed a circuit to play tic-tac-toe, and later I designed a circuit to add numbers. I never got round to adding a clock and designing a real processor, because at about that time I came across the TRS-80. So I bought one and taught myself to program from the (actually rather good) manual.

I taught myself Z80 code from a book (someone Rodney, or something), then wrote a compiler from a limited subset of BASIC to Z80 machine code. No assembler, no linker, no loader, just a straight conversion from BASIC source to Z80 machine code residing in memory.

Added in edit: Radnay Zaks, "Programming the Z80", first published 1979.

The subset of BASIC was enough to actually write the compiler, and I remember adding the DATA and READ statements to the compiler, then using them, and the net result was smaller. The DATA and READ statements allowed data-driven techniques, so code generation became simpler. It was an interesting insight - a more powerful program was sometimes actually smaller, implemented in less code.

And all this was mentor-less, as I knew no one who could program. It was 1979, and I was 17 (although I turned 18 a few months later).

At the time I wrote my first programs I was about 10 years old and I wrote them on an IBM x8680 that an acquaintance donated to us because he'd have thrown the machine away otherwise.

I didn't receive any tutoring in programming until to the age of 22.

Back then there was no internet and tutoring in IT was unthinkable in schools. Barely anybody had a computer in the first place, something which just a short while after changed quickly.

No option for both parents :) although my mum hadn't done it for years when I was starting out. I wouldn't say either of was a mentor though, I learnt by myself.

I learned to program in 8 bg -- in 1990, 8 years before google. My technical references where a single c++ book and later a borrowed (a teacher at school knew an engineering professor at a local university) copy of msdn on a pile of cds in a box. My parents where not programmers; few people where at that time, and my parents didn't know any. I wouldn't have internet access for another 5 years, and when I got it, it was over a 56k baud modem.

One of my parents was a programmer but over time had forgotten all they knew about it so they had no influence on me. I learned to program of my own accord due to an interest in computers since I was young.

No one person mentored me as I learned to program.

I learned programming mostly from the book that came with my first computer (at 15) and magazines (Byte magazine was a wonderful resource in the mid 80s, as well as the magazines specific to my computer). I really didn't have anyone to ask questions, so any questions I had, I had to puzzle out on my own.

I selected other. I had a close family member who taught me about computer hardware and introduced me to programming but he didn't really code. He'd done some coding in computer courses he took but very basic stuff. In other words I was introduced to programming by him but wasn't actually taught any programming.

No one around me was related to neither programming nor engineering.

I learned to program through a family member in a rather different way. My grandfather, who had since passed away, always talked to me about all the engineering feats he worked on at JPL. I was 12 when he died. He left me all of his computers and manuals, 5 and 7 inch floppy disks, and everything from MS-DOS to books that basically amounted to datasheets for the 68000, 8080, 8086, Z80, and a few other CPUs. most of what he left me was 16-bit era coding material, but it didn't matter, the principles were the same. In a school of kids that knew nothing about programming, knowing how to work with things that made adults head spin, made me feel special. I knew by the beginning of high school that i wanted to program.

I'll never forget all that my grandfather taught me, even though it was taught posthumously.

One of my parents was a programmer and yet nobody mentored me!

Which probably explains why my dad is a systems programmer writing drivers for Windows and I'm using Haskell on Linux to do programming language stuff with a healthy dose of PL theory. Hard to imagine any way to be so different while staying in the same field.

It would be interesting to see this split down by age too. It's less likely the parent of someone learning to code in the 70's/80's was a programmer. It was also probably a lot more difficult to learn to code back then without a mentor. Now that's not too big of a problem thanks to the internet.

I got introduced to programming because my dad was a programmer, but besides him being excellent and math and checking sourcelists against magazines after I typed them in, he didn't really answer much questions in that regard. I learned most when I was 7 or 8 begin 80s by copying lists to my computer (because my father was a programmer and then manager we had computers very early) and then changing them. After a while I changed then so much that they were something else and I was able to start from scratch. Most of that was basic / assembly but I never had issues progressing to OO or functional languages after that.

"No one person mentored me as I learned to program." does this mean "no one" or "no single person"?

My mother was a computer programmer. She worked on big iron (PL/1) but had no interest in programming away from the office, so I wouldn't say she mentored me.

My mentor was my father, a chemist. He showed me how to program BASIC on the lab computer that he sometimes brought home at weekends. That was a Commodore Pet, I was about 8 at the time.

The options offered here are significantly disconnected from the question. The possession of a programming parent need not be connected with the acquisition of the art in oneself (though I would hazard that it is still likely to be an influencing factor).

My Dad is a programmer, but I and my two elder brothers all developed the curiosity for such matters and learned programming on our own with no assistance from our Dad or each other (my eldest brother began at about seven, my elder brother and I following suit at a slightly earlier age; I was five or six when I began). But I suppose it was Dad who ensured that there were a couple of books on BASIC for us to learn from.

So I can answer:

- One of my parents was a programmer.

- Another close family member was a programmer.

- No one person mentored me as I learned to program.

- And, of course, that term which ever eludes accurate definition: "Other".

I was lucky enough to learn the BASICs from my father. He, being a mathematician and having dabbled with programming at university, would play around with his own things on the computer in the evening, and I was rather interested in watching him create simple graphical things on the screen.

I think that my first experience was messing around with VRML, learning the mathematical ideas necessary for 3D world manipulation. Once my father saw that I was interested, he showed me some tutorials and documentation (downloaded onto the computer as the internet connection was horrendous), and I gradually learnt to create worlds. The programming part of VRML was the ECMAScript that one could use to control the objects, with which I was able to create and control a Rubik's cube, plot the solar system and stars from star catalogues, and generate patterns using L-Systems. From there, I was introduced to Basic4GL, and then was able to access various programs in some of my father's old fractal books, with explanations from him when needed. The beauty of recursion followed!

I experienced MATLAB, Java, and my favourite, C, at university. All of which was was too newfangled for my father to know anything about. But without his guiding hand when I was younger, I would never have discovered the ever-linked joys and frustrations of programming, and taken the courses that I did later on in life. I count myself lucky that I had someone available to answer my questions and keep me interested, otherwise I would probably have got bored and annoyed far too soon and quit before I'd really got started!

I had a friend who claimed he was an elite hacker (we were both 13). I wanted to be an elite hacker too, so I borrowed his book on Visual Basic 6.

As it turns out, he was not an elite hacker, and I wasn't going to become one by learning VB.

That said, it set me on a path (and maybe pattern) of self-learning that I think only the internet made possible. My real programming mentors were some cool folks on some online bulletin boards, who helped out serious n00bs like me along the way.

My parents were computer illiterate (I must have been the last kid in my 'hood to get a computer), and they never thought my little programming hobby would develop into anything of use!

Now I'm 27, have had a fun ride so far, and have to credit it to some power users on, wait for it, extremevisualbasicforum.com

PS: Of course, I moved away from that and like most at HN, do back-end/front-end of webapps now.

My dad was a programmer for about 5 years back in the 70's but has been a lawyer for the past 25+ years. So I don't think that counts.

However, I do think I ended up with some kind of "origin bonus" because I grew up in Redmond Washington surrounded by programmers. That gave me a mindset and style of problem solving very conducive to programming I think.

No

My father is from the high tech of the previous generation: radio and electronics. If it can get a signal from A to B, he's done something with it. Radio, microwave, copper, fibre optic, satellite and probably a bunch of other things I don't know about. He's worked in remote parts of Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia and Antarctica.

I imagine that in a different place and time he'd have been a steam engineer. In yet another time and place: a computer engineer. But he was born when radio was king, before electrical engineering was a university-degree bearing profession instead of a trade.

Both parents were programmers. Mom has been retired since before I was born, Dad is still working as a DBA nearing retirement. My brother and I are both employed as programmers, and my sister is due to graduate this summer with a CS degree.

It might be interesting to collect this data by age ranges, the probability to have a programming parent shrinks if you are older because less people programmed back than. I wonder how many people younger than me (24) learned it from their parents.

I started programming when I was around 12 to script computer games. I struggled with the scripting environment of one of them, misunderstood the mention that it had a "c-like syntax", bought my first book about C and the rest is history ;)

My dad was a self-taught programmer (he was a chemical engineer and loved to learn new things). I started by playing games on our Apple IIe (with a tape drive and 114k of RAM!), then typing in games from magazines, then tweaking those games to work the way I wanted.

When I was 15 I got a job at a gas station and built a service reminder system for them, based on some software my dad wrote. I had to replace about half of his code, so it probably would have been faster to start from scratch but I didn't have the confidence to do that at that time. I got a little help from my dad, but not much.

Most of my friends were geeks (we played D&D at lunch in the math wing of our high school, and most of us were in the band) but only one of them became a programmer as a career.

I'm surprised by this poster, not at all surprised by the results. I thought my experience was pretty standard, and the results seem to indicate that. My dad had an Apple IIe and a Dos machine while I was growing up, and I quickly surpassed his (very limited) technical knowledge once we moved up to the DOS box. Everything else was self taught. A lot of my skills I never remember learning - I just grew up always on the computer.

In fact, if being a programmer was his job, I'd probably be turned off by it. I remember a friend of mine had a dad who was a programmer, but while the kids were all pretty good with the computer I never remember him teaching them things as such - in fact, I turned this friend on to a lot of game creation engines, etc. myself.