survey

[gusl]

1) Did you write computer programs as a child?

2) What language?

3) How did you learn? Did you have someone teach you?

4) Did you ever meet other kids who programmed?

I think most kids today no longer have this opportunity.


MY ANSWERS:

1) Yes. I started when I was 7.
2) Basic, on my MSX. Later, DOS QBasic (which no longer required line numbers).
3) I learned from examples: whenever you loaded a game on the cassette, the code listing was right there. I still don't remember what my first program was (probably something with PRINT and INPUT), or why I decided to write it. I started out by myself, but occasionally learned things from my uncle who was a programmer, or read something in magazines.
4) Nope. Not that I know.

Comments

[marknau.livejournal.com]

1) Yes. We got a TRS-80 when I was 10 or 11
2) Basic, then some Pascal and Machine Instruction on the Apple II.
3) Largely self-taught, absorbing user manuals and BYTE magazines. My best friend and I spent a lot of time writing simple games or problem-solving programs.
4) Mainly we two friends, but we also knew others who programmed, mostly through school.

[darius.livejournal.com]

I started in Basic when I was 11-12. There was a summer camp where I got at some computers for the first time; after that I learned from books and magazines. It was another year or two before I had a computer to try things out on. There were a few other local kids into computers, but we didn't interact nearly as much as I learned on my own.

Byte was a cool magazine back then (early 80s). I'd like to see more code-intensive writing like that online. Also, my lack of a computer meant it was just as easy to get into less-popular languages like Pascal and Forth. The first issue of Byte I saw had this weird Lisp program and I wanted to learn what the hell that was about...

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

1) Did you write computer programs as a child? Yep. Pretty simple, but...

2) What language? Basic, on an Apple II+ and IIe

3) How did you learn? Did you have someone teach you? I don't honestly remember. But prolly from a book.

4) Did you ever meet other kids who programmed? 1 or 2, but I was generally alone in my machine fascination.

[selfishgene.livejournal.com]

Far more kids have this opportunity today, than in your teenage years. Only a small percentage avail themselves of this, but in absolute magnitude there must be millions.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

The point is that the (popular) systems of today don't encourage programming.

My MSX environment was more conducive to programming than even Linux.

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

1. Yes
2. Apple IIe Basic at first, later Hypercard and Pascal
3. Yeah, our elementary school had computer classes that involved programming in a trivial way from very early on. They basically told us exactly what to type in and we did. Still it gave me a feeling of "hey, I can do this" agency.
4. Only a few of us actually stayed interested in it enough to learn more outside of class, but yeah.

[callmeemma.livejournal.com]

1) Did you write computer programs as a child?
Yes, on an old Apple IIc we got when I was 8.

2) What language?
Basic

3) How did you learn? Did you have someone teach you?
My mom and I started to learn out of a few books, and she quickly gave up and I continued. I remember reading programs that came with the computer and figuring out how commands worked... if the books really had tutorial-type stuff, I didn't read it much.

4) Did you ever meet other kids who programmed?
Nope, not until high school.

[xuande.livejournal.com]

If Microsoft sticks to the .NET Framework, future versions of Windows will at least ship with an application programming language (C#, which is pretty easy to learn, to boot).

Also, I think a fair amount of kids nowadays are learning to program JavaScript for fancy webpage design. I've met at least one high-school student for whom that was their introduction to computer programming.

But you're right, it's still nothing like turning on the computer and going straight to a BASIC prompt (which I assume the MSX did, like other computers of its generation).

[xuande.livejournal.com]

1) Did you write computer programs as a child?
Yes, on a Commodore 64 my parents got when I was 2 or so.

2) What language?
Basic

3) How did you learn? Did you have someone teach you?
The first non-trivial book my parents got me was a programming book called Kids and the Commodore 64, so I ended up learning to program at about the same time I was learning how to write. At first I couldn't understand it and I got really mad at my parents about it (I wasn't very mature). But I eventually figured it out. My dad helped me a little bit at first by typing in the sample programs for me, but aside from that I was self-taught.

4) Did you ever meet other kids who programmed?
Only briefly, at a summer camp or something like that. None of the folks I went to school with programmed until college.

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

1) Did you write computer programs as a child?
A: Sort of.

2) What language?
A: Binary.

3) How did you learn? Did you have someone teach you?
A: I built my first computer “chip” from scratch, a 4 bit Frankenstein on a breadboard, about a year later I built an Altair.

4) Did you ever meet other kids who programmed?
A: I didn’t meet other kids that knew what a computer was in the first place, they did not really exist in the personal form when I was a kid. I met Bill Gates back in the late 70s once. He made the first language for the Altair. I built a papertape reader to read basic into the computer. I never understood basic very well, although I wrote a simple database in it for a company I was working for.

[techstep.livejournal.com]

1) I did some programming on a Tandy PC-7 calculator in the late 80s, and shortly thereafter on the Apple (at school) and the Commodore 64 (at home).

2) Basic at first, though later I started using Pilot (on the 64), Pascal (on the Apple), and assembly (on both).

3) I learned mostly through reading books and typing in code examples. I read Compute!, Run, and Nibble.

4) I didn't know any kids who programmed until junior high. In high school I ran into more programming types, but around that time I started drifting away from coding.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I think when we were younger most kids didn't have the opportunity either. It's just that the ones that did ended up in social circles where we all know each other now.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

True. In fact, obvious our sample is very biased. And I believe that programming as a kid makes you significantly more intelligent, so partly we all know each other as a consequence of the fact that we programmed as kids (i.e. not merely a correlation).

Of course, I still haven't taken into account how my LJ circle differs from the average "intelligent" person.

I would like to meet present-day kids who are learning to program. These days, if anything, most kids are learning HTML (and then call it "programming"). I would like to meet the few who do real programming... I just can't imagine how they would get into it, though... (enthusiastic programmer parents seems unlikely)

[fub.livejournal.com]

1) Did you write computer programs as a child?
Yes.

2) What language?
First BASIC on a P2000C, then BASIC on a MZ731 (with the tiny four-color plotter!), and later on lots of BASIC on an MSX-1 and -2 and Turbo Basic on the PC.

3) How did you learn? Did you have someone teach you?
My dad taught me the basics (pun intended) of variables, PRINT and INPUT. With that under my belt, I learned more and more from books.

4) Did you ever meet other kids who programmed?
Yup. We lived close to Eindhoven, headquarters of Philips. Philips personnel could get their MSX-computers cheaply from the company store, so I knew quite a few kids with MSX computers. Somehow I assembled a group of fellow geeks, and we exchanged notes on programming tricks. Good fun.

I think most kids today no longer have this opportunity.
There are no home computers anymore -- it's all PC (or, seldomly, Mac). Having a small machine that you can just hook up to a TV that boots straight into BASIC gives you a tremendous impulse to start experimenting. With today's GUI-oriented systems, there is little to be gained from going 'behind the scenes', so to speak.

Also, even though the programs that I made lacked a certain sophistication, I did manage to write a system for making text adventures, for instance. And this was in the time that one could buy 'The Hobbit'-text adventure commercially -- so I proved to myself that I, in potential, could make something like that too. That is enormously motivating.
Today's games are all highly optimised first-person shooters with photorealistic graphics. There is just no way that an amateur could even try to create something like that. That doesn't motivate as well: "I spent three weeks programming, and still it's nothing like the software that I normally use!"

I think more kids have this opportunity than ever before, but I think less and less kids are seizing that opportunity. I am wondering what the long-term effects on the software industry is: the next generation is growing up without any hands-on programming experience (other than the really determined kids who use stuff like Visual Basic). Maybe it's better: when I started studying Computer Science, the first thing that was told to us is that we had to forget all our bad programming habits...

[fub.livejournal.com]

If Microsoft sticks to the .NET Framework
Longhorn might do this -- but it was recently announced that Longhorn itself will not be completely built in .NET. So it remains to be seen whether a ready-to-use programming environment will be available.

[xuande.livejournal.com]

All they would have to do is ship it ready to run .NET programs. The .NET Framework redistributables include a C# compiler (and I think maybe compilers for a few other language).

Zettai unmei mokushiroku

[xuande.livejournal.com]

Love the icon =)

Re: Zettai unmei mokushiroku

[fub.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you like it. Took me two evenings of fiddling with ripping the DVDs, resizing and adding the text, and then optimising it so it would all fit within the 40KB limit...

[fub.livejournal.com]

But will it include an IDE, or will the youngsters need to find out how to write the code in notepad and compile it on the commandline?

[xuande.livejournal.com]

Notepad and command line, I'm afraid.

[fub.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I think that it won't be such a great draw like it was in the era of homecomputers -- if you have to go looking for the programming environment, it won't spur inquistive people on. Unless they are really looking to program in the first place, in which case there are many (free) languages to choose from, like Perl or Python.

[kinejoshua.livejournal.com]

With the growth of the Internet and the increasing social acceptance of computers and computer mastery, I think programming is more popular than ever before.

Some evidence: A very large portion of the people I know from Mathcamp program (in degrees varying from web design to fiddling with QBasic to setting up a Linux box to coding inequality solvers and winning various awards at the USACO (http://oldweb.uwp.edu/academic/mathematics/usaco/) programming contest). Much more surprisingly, a sizable number of people from my high school program (mostly on TI-83 graphic calculators, but we also have an AP Computer Science course and such).

Analysis: With computers and the Internet becoming more and more a part of kids' lives (mp3s, instant messaging, blogs), being able to control and interact with computers in a deeper and more creative way is becoming increasingly desirable and, well, cool. And even if that's complete crap, the Internet's made it impossibly easy for geeks to be drawn into and to learn programming. Ten or twenty years ago, a poor isolated nerd who was interested in learning programming might have few places to turn for guidance. The chances of him or her finding like-minded people to be encouraged by and learn from is even smaller. Things are clearly different now with the Internet.