Personally, I started off with Roblox back in the early 2010s, and taught myself Lua. I really liked those Tycoon games, and wanted to see how they worked.
I eventually found Minecraft (like every kid back in the day did), and learnt Java to make Bukkit server mods.
Around 2016 I thought websites were kinda cool, so I started learning HTML, CSS, and JS, and I’ve been in the web dev space ever since.
What about the rest of y’all? What’s your personal programming path?
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 😵💫
Minecraft plugins, a very fun way to learn Java
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.
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.
My experience almost exactly. I built the interest by making/hacking TI-83 games, then made math class programs which i never really used because i had learned the material. It was fun, eye opening, and paved a path to my career!
Took a random programming fundamentals course in college. The rest is the rest
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 had 4 years to hone my skills before getting any Neofriends…. Mom wouldn’t send the fax.)
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.
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