Why did you start programing?

[ofek]

I started because since the day i got my first computer there was a click.
after about 2 years with computers i knew anything a 8 year old boy could know about computer and as i was playing starcraft at the time, i wanted to get myself a chat bot.
i played with many bots reconfiguring everything in them and decided that this isn't enough and i want to build my own bot.
vb was the hot language for that at the time so i went to the computer shop closest to my house and baught a vb book for about 30$.
now im alittle older and i think that if it wasn't for starcraft something else would have driven me to program its the course of nature. I had to work with computers theres nothing im better at. (well if u don't count running :cool: )

[Drakx]

I just wanted to know how and why my computer was doing what it did :) i'd always been intrested in programming, but keept putting it off then one day i thought what the hell :) so i started to learn (at an age of 22/3 yrs old) and even now im still learning :).

[darth_vector]

i got into electronics a lot as a kid. the next logical step was microcontrolers, so i learnt to program in assembler for a few simple microprocessors. i have never gotten used to high level languages - assembler is just so sexy!

[majikstreet]

I am currently learning python. Why? I want to be able to make a difference.

[rn0dal]

Since the day I learned that programs were made to solve problems and to create problems I have been interested in programming. Also to make games.:)


-r

[teddy69]

OCD lol

[UbuWu]

Out of curiosity. Mostly played around with basic (a long time ago) and python (right now). Must admit though that the most useful things I created were dos batch scripts.

[thumper]

I decided that I wanted to write games. This was at the age of 10 back with CPM, and a disk of games that I thought was pretty cool.

Most of the people who were programming back as I was growing up were doing BASIC on their TV plug in sets, but I never really liked BASIC. Did a bit but never liked it.

Got Turbo Pascal 5.5 for Christmas when I was 15 and started getting books on data structures out of the library and tried to work with them.

By this stage I had worked out that games were actually quite hard to write and I was never going to produce the quality of game I liked because I was neither a graphic artist or a music composer. However, I did love programming, and always knew that was what I wanted to do for a job, so did Computer Science at university and have been programming for a job since I graduated 12 years ago.

I still love programming, and even if (by some fluke of probability) I won a huge amount of money, I would still program, but doing things that I want to do.

[23meg]

I started because of the naturalness of C64 BASIC that makes it both an OS and a programming language. Just by reading the user's manual that came with the computer, you got a head start in learning BASIC, and if you are a curious type, after learning the basic logic of programming (pun unintended) it's impossible not to delve a bit deeper. I had a C64 when I was 4 years old; the first things I learnt to read and write in my life were BASIC commands. I haven't advanced much afterwards though; all I've learnt is HTML and bits of Pascal and Javascript. Just diving into Python these days.

[NewWithoutClue]

well, the truth is i was under the impression that becoming a programmer was something you need to do to become a 1337 h4x0r and break into servers.
After i noticed that the media view of a hacker is just plain stupid and childish, i started to see programming for what it really is ( freedom ). Now i challenge myself in everything i do, that's programming related, just for the self pride i gain everytime i figure some little detail out.

and now i have to admit: I HAVE 'THE BUG' ( you know what i mean )

Regards,
Paul.

[bmbeeman]

well, I sat down and played a game written in python and thought it would be fun and try to make my own, and now I know the entire language in and out and use it to create useless amusing junk...

[simon w]

I realised that it was something I enjoyed and now I get paid to do it :)

[Griff]

I just wanted to know how and why my computer was doing what it did.
That's all it took for me.;)

[gray-squirrel]

I started because of the naturalness of C64 BASIC that makes it both an OS and a programming language. Just by reading the user's manual that came with the computer, you got a head start in learning BASIC, and if you are a curious type, after learning the basic logic of programming (pun unintended) it's impossible not to delve a bit deeper. I had a C64 when I was 4 years old; the first things I learnt to read and write in my life were BASIC commands. I haven't advanced much afterwards though; all I've learnt is HTML and bits of Pascal and Javascript. Just diving into Python these days.

I was in 4th grade when I started playing with the C64. I, like some others, wanted to design games. Although I knew a lot about music and graphics, I was never able to get any programs that I wrote to work, although it was easier for me to at least try to debug BASIC programs than machine language. Well, the 6502 instruction set was not that overwhelming. Now that I have been able to write programs since the first college class I took, I can look back and say that I was a little bit too immature to have a method of debugging programs back then. And I gave up too much.

Writing games is too much for me nowadays. I'm content doing less complicated things, such as writing VBA modules to handle copier activity information I collect at work. When that is complete, that should buy me some time while I go to work on a version, written in C++ and SQL, which will not depend on Microsoft Access.

(A career in software development for me at the moment sounds like an elusive dream, but it would be fun.)

[Adrian]

As a kid, I really loved video games. However, my dad bought a Sinclair QL in the mid 80's with almost no good games at all (Mortville Manor for the QL is still one of my absolute favourites though). I had no other choice but to write my own games, with the help of painfully long BASIC listings published in magazines such as QL World. Being a little kid, I never made any advanced QL game, but I learned the fundaments of the BASIC language.

In 1988 I got an Amiga, and since AmigaBASIC (by Microsoft) was useless I started programming assembler instead (in K-Seka :) ).

[macewan]

the voices said to do it so I did

[23meg]

As a kid, I really loved video games. However, my dad bought a Sinclair QL in the mid 80's with almost no good games at all (Mortville Manor for the QL is still one of my absolute favourites though). I had no other choice but to write my own games, with the help of painfully long BASIC listings published in magazines such as QL World. Being a little kid, I never made any advanced QL game, but I learned the fundaments of the BASIC language.

In 1988 I got an Amiga, and since AmigaBASIC (by Microsoft) was useless I started programming assembler instead (in K-Seka :) ).

I hear you; I recall crying out loud as a kid when games / apps I literally typed in as code from magazines didn't work.. Printed code was actually a method of software distribution!

[gord]

age of 5: opened my brother (roberts) zx spectrum book, copyed the simplist simpiles


10 print "Barry is an idiot"
20 GOTO 10
run


obviously i skillfully modifyed the original hello world code to suit my perpose (barry is my other brothers name ;)). tinkering and having fun, never looked back. best program i ever made too.

[wilford]

As a kid, I really loved video games. However, my dad bought a Sinclair QL in the mid 80's with almost no good games at all (Mortville Manor for the QL is still one of my absolute favourites though). I had no other choice but to write my own games, with the help of painfully long BASIC listings published in magazines such as QL World. Being a little kid, I never made any advanced QL game, but I learned the fundaments of the BASIC language.

In 1988 I got an Amiga, and since AmigaBASIC (by Microsoft) was useless I started programming assembler instead (in K-Seka ).


I hear you; I recall crying out loud as a kid when games / apps I literally typed in as code from magazines didn't work.. Printed code was actually a method of software distribution!

WoW! I salute you guys. :D So what kind of games did you guys make? :D

[PsyberOneZero]

I come from a family of nerds, so when other kids were playing with action figures I was reading the Programming books on the shelf. I wrote my 1st program in QBasic at 8 or 9 (1990-ish), by copying the program out of the BASIC book, then I started messing with the programs and writing my own.

The next major venture was the TI-XX Calculators, I still have a really crappy shell floating around out there (I got 1 or 2 support Q's every year) and made an enhanced version of Drug Wars.

Now I'm re-learning most of it, C# and C++ are my weapons of choice.

[23meg]

WoW! I salute you guys. :D So what kind of games did you guys make? :D
I wouldn't call it "making", it's just typing in. I recall playing a monochrome pacman clone this way, the name escapes me. I was also able to get a simple word processor going, but was unable to save it to cassette, so every time i wanted to play around with it I had to type it in. Sounds crazy but it's good practice; check out my rant in here. (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=458726&postcount=13)

[Adrian]

WoW! I salute you guys. :D So what kind of games did you guys make? :D

I began by just copying the instructions from the magazine, character by character, hence ending up with someone elses game. This was NOT fun, especially when it didn't work and I had to verify the correctness of the "copy". The first program I ever "copied" was written in assembler, and looked like this:



<A few rows of understandable BASIC code, to load the assembly stuff>
10 REM blah blah
10 REM blah blah blah

<3-4 pages of RAW DATA>
100 DATA 123,23,12,32,41,23,12,42,123,12,32,14,23,15,123,23 4,23,225
110 DATA 19,243,232,123,124,42,34,123,43,123,12,42,123,42,3 1,234
120 ...


Imagine how nice it was to discover that something was wrong and to realize that I had to go through those lines again... Fortunately that game was pretty funny, even though I didn't learn anything by typing it (except that you must be very focused when typing DATA statements). It was a colorful side scrolling shooter, by the way.

Another nice memory is when I copied a long program, just to find out that it didn't work. I couldn't find any error, but said to myself "you must not give up!!" and checked the code like 10 times, before finally giving up. The next month I received a new issue of QL World, and guess what... The code I "copied" wasn't correct, and they supplied a couple of "bugfixes" that immediately made my "copy" work... I remember how happy I was to finally see it in action!

My own programming experiments started by modifying my "copies". First I changed some text (being a kid, I thought that was really fun)... Then I started changing stuff like number of lives, enemy speed and such. When that wasn't funny anymore, I actually tried to understand the mechanisms behind some of the smaller games that I had "copied". I learned a lot by doing that, although not enough to build my own games from scratch.

Then I seriously started reading the BASIC handbook that was supplied with the computer. First it was very difficult (being a swedish kid, my english was very poor (and my brain was "still under construction", so to speak)), but after a while I started to understand more and more. My first game was a simple text adventure, consisting of print, input and goto statements (and of course a couple of if/then/else). The first "action" game I did by myself was a "shooter" where an object (a character) was travelling across the screen, and I had to press space at exactly the right moment to shoot it down. This sounds easy (and it is :) ), but for me it was a difficult project. Later on I added more objects, and better control.

Then I got my Amiga, and suddenly I was a much better programmer. But that is another story.

[matthew]

My old TRS-80 Color Computer booted into a BASIC editor so it was how I thought all computers worked when I was ten. I read the BASIC manual that came with the computer, convinced my parents a year or two later to upgrade my machine from 4k ram to 32k and to buy me a disk drive so I wouldn't have to retype my programs every time the computer was turned off (daily since my monitor was also the family television). I used to type in the programs from computer magazines every month just like some others have mentioned.

I started to study assembly when I was 14 but suddenly girls and cars became more interesting.

I took a BASIC class in high school for an easy A. I was signing up for Pascal the next semester but my family moved and the new school didn't offer anything similar.

In college I studied Lisp, but at the same time I discovered that I have other interests as well (plus all those parentheses drove me nuts and kind of soured me on programming for a while) so I drifted away from programming. Besides, with the snazzy networked IBM 8086's in the computer lab I could write papers on WordPerfect and check my email from the university vax system and never need to know how to program.

Fast forward almost 15 years. I haven't written a program or read a line of code since 1990 or so. I was fluent with the DOS command line and used it regularly until I was dragged kicking and screaming into the Windows age.

Last April I discovered Linux...I'd heard about it for years, but hadn't had any experience. I tried Ubuntu as a dual boot with WindowsXP and after 4 or 5 months I erased the NTFS partition. Now I'm 100% Linux. I've read O'Reilly's Learning the Bash Shell (among others) and am getting a pretty good handle on the basics as well as some really simple shell scripting.

This week I decided to jump back in the water and bought O'Reilly's Practical C Programming just for fun. I figure I can start with the basics and gradually move up to C++, maybe some Java, Python or Perl later. This will just be in my free time so it will probably take me a while to learn anything really useful and I don't forsee becoming a programming guru or anything, but hopefully I can have a little fun--and that's why at 10 years old I wanted a computer in the first place.

[wilford]

The point is, CLI environments in their time of dominance in the 80s forced their users to become half-savvy with the very logic of computation, and I sincerely think this was a good thing that we don't have today.
...Today in the dominance of the GUI people don't have that; they take the white space of Word as "paper", the desktops of window environments as a "desk" on which they can lay the "paper", so on. The computer was given a facelift to mimic the physical daily environment, and this makes people treat it as if it were a direct extension of it, in total ignorance of its true nature.
I see your point. But for me, I didn' have that experience because in my generation, the computer was already in desktop, click this and that mode. And thats why I registered here at ubuntu. I wanna try out the old fashion way of computer. And maybe i'l learn something..:D

Btw, when you say copy. Where do you copy from anyway? (Like i said, i'm a bit dumb, please bare with me) :D


I began by just copying the instructions from the magazine, character by character, hence ending up with someone elses game. This was NOT fun, especially when it didn't work and I had to verify the correctness of the "copy"...
The first "action" game I did by myself was a "shooter" where an object (a character) was travelling across the screen, and I had to press space at exactly the right moment to shoot it down. This sounds easy (and it is :) ), but for me it was a difficult project. Later on I added more objects, and better control.

I like what your doing man.:D And i want to try i out too. What programming language did you use anyway? Can you give me a sample (but running) code so i can ry it out? :D I want to tinker with simple game, but i don't have something to tinker with..:D

Thanks man. Both of you. :D

[matthew]

Btw, when you say copy. Where do you copy from anyway? (Like i said, i'm a bit dumb, please bare with me) :D You're not dumb, it's just been a long time since this was around so you have probably never seen it. Back in the 1980's the most common way to share software in magazines was to print the code (sometimes page after page in small type) in the magazine. This was well before cd's and dvd's and at the time even floppy disks were a bit expensive and could generally only be read by one type of computer. Also, the amount of ram in the computers of the day was a lot smaller, meaning programs were a lot smaller too. However, even 4 or 5 k of BASIC code was a lot to type in. :)

If you really want to see some examples, just for history's sake, I would suppose your public library may still have some bound copies of these old magazines somewhere in the stacks.

[23meg]

Right, these magazines would have separate "code supplements" printed in lower quality, non-glossy paper, like newspapers; think of it as the early form of magazines giving software cds and dvds :) Most of the stuff you'd type for BASIC programs would be endless numbers with DATA lines; thanks Adrian for remining me of this.. If you got just one number wrong among the pages and pages of DATA lines, the program wouldn't work..

[bytter]

Started programming @ the age of 6 on a MSX computer. Why? Because my father bought me a second hand computer with no games (he didn't knew anything about computers) and nothing more but an "user and programmer manual"... I'm 25 now and got a degree in Computer Engineering, so that computer actually "molded" my life... For those that are thinking it is sad to see a boy @ age 6 stuck with a computer instead of playing, let them know: I had far, far more time to "play" in high school and college than I would if I had to learn/study ;) Good old days!

Which reminds me... Is there anyone here who had a Commodore Amiga and programmed with AMOS? I started playing with it back in 1991/92, which actually made me interest in computer graphics. Around 93/94 I moved to the PC where I've learned Pascal, then C++ and x86 Asm (old good intel-like syntax embedded in DJGPP :) and was caught in the high-days of Demoscene, just after the mythical Future Crew's Second Reality. Anyone from those old days with a 1200baud modem and nothing more but BBSs access? :D

Recently, with the advent of emulators (though my Amiga 500 still works), I've had an attack of nostalgia and started to plot out some kind of AMOS clone for the PC. I know, I know.. There are some out there. Most notably, Clickteam, the original creators of AMOS, had been releasing several products to easily make *games* with a BASIC-like language and high-level functions. Same with their old comptetitors, BlitzBASIC. Still (though blitzBASIC has a Linux version of their BlitzMax), there is no open-source integrated development environment (IDE) specifically made to easily develop games and demo-like stuff. Something as easy as AMOS was to deploy graphics (2Dish.. vector, perhaps :)) and sound...

All this makes me wonder why kids today do not develop the same interest my generation developed with computers and pogramming. Maybe because, at that time, everything was far more simpler, the choice was much less, and the SNr was far smaller than it is today.

So.. Anyone willing to participate in such a project?

[bytter]

Software Failure. Press left mouse button to continue.
Guru Meditation #00000000.48454C50

Dude!!! A Guru Meditation Error! Now, I haven't seen those for a long time! :)
So, AMOS and DevPac2 ring a bell to you? :D

[public_void]

Learnt Delphi in College. Now doing C# at uni, although I'm not keen with is being a Microsoft langauge. But I hope to move to something else after, its just to get more experience.


All this makes me wonder why kids today do not develop the same interest my generation developed with computers and pogramming. Maybe because, at that time, everything was far more simpler, the choice was much less, and the SNr was far smaller than it is today.

Nowadays everything done for them. The programs are so easy to understand they don't need to know how it works. When I was young I often wonder how a computer did what it did. If you've got that interest it motivates you to learn more. When I started to program I wanted to learn more, so I did that. It gave me better knowledge than some of my classmates yet I still want to know more especially open source and non-Microsoft world of programming.

[NeoRc]

Actually, I played an awesome game, and I want to know how to make it, and wish someday I can make someone like that.

[wilford]

If you really want to see some examples, just for history's sake, I would suppose your public library may still have some bound copies of these old magazines somewhere in the stacks.

Haha. Okies. But i doubt theres any. :D Is there a site for some sample codes? :D Thanks for both of your help matthew, 23meg. :D

[Adrian]

Dude!!! A Guru Meditation Error! Now, I haven't seen those for a long time! :)
So, AMOS and DevPac2 ring a bell to you? :D

Of course they do! :)
I never used Devpac myself since I got so used to K-Seka (and especially its successors like MasterSeka and Asmone), but I know it was quality stuff. The same goes for AMOS... I never did anything in it beacuse I quickly became too used to assembler, but a lot of my friends were praising it all the time.


Is there a site for some sample codes?

Well, I did a quick google search and found this:
http://www.kidwaresoftware.com/javagames.htm

It's a better idea to learn Java than BASIC these days, if you're interested in simple game programming (and after you've learned Java, the transition to C++ will be easy if you want to move on the the "big" projects :) )

Note that you probably won't find the games posted above funny, since you have no nostalgic connection to them. There are however plenty of more "modern" games with free source code out there, so just do a google search. For instance, I immediately found this:

http://www.codebeach.com/index.asp?TabID=1&CategoryID=4&SubcategoryID=11

Ehum... OK, maybe not so "modern", but I'm sure you will find better examples if you give it a couple of minutes.

[kanenas.net]

Just for fun !!!
:D