Copying C-64 basic snippets from borrowed copies of a magazine. Then "hacking" (breaking) games to do silly things, as a kid is wont to do. I don't think I actually programmed anything meaningful or useful until I got my Amiga 500, and even then nothing serious until high school and the PC.

Well, it was a long time ago in a far far away land known as the very early 2000s there was this kid who wanted to make an Age of Empires: RoR online clan website so he went searching through the scary interwebs and bumped into a website that told him about something called a geocities account.

He had to complete a mission first though, filling out forms and data to be able to achieve the goal of earning this geocities account.

Once he had obtained this glorious account he went on his way searching through the web to learn what this mystery language was and how to speak it.

Spending hours and days of searching he finally got a grasp on this mysterious language, the gods called it "HTML". He spoke to the gods of the internet and found more information regarding this language and he learned how to start making his own website.

He would spend hours and days just studying this mysterious language to make his website.

Eventually he was able to make his website, but as he grew older he lost interest in it and moved on.

Sadly this also meant all the work and time he put into that website was also wasted as it has since vanished from the mysterious interwebs.

QBasic on MS-DOS !
...around 1995, 10yrs old

I started programming when I realized that actually coding functionality would give me much more control over game development than the no-coding-required game development systems way back then. So, I asked my dad to teach me how to make programs and he gave me his old Visual Basic (2005) CD and showed me some examples and I basically taught myself with the help of YouTube video tutorials. Eventually I got bored of VB and decided I wanted more control and learned Pascal and when I got into Linux I started learning Python, then C and Java and even some Assembly. Funnily enough I haven't actually done much game development during these years.

I got started around 1986 when my father bought a second hand Sharp MZ-721 from a colleague. The darn thing was one of the most baren things after "boot" it had just a "monitor" everything had to be loaded after that, from tapes.
Apart from that slow start to get to something resembling a program it was also very unknown by everybody around me.
So with only a few games on it I decided that learn how to make games on it. For days I sat with both a manual and a dictionary (I was around 8 and didn't really speak english) step by step I got things "going" on the darn thing. This was all in basic though. The games never really happened and the best thing I wrote in those days was a drawing program. To clarify this thing had NO graphics mode but did have graphical characters that would help.
A few years later we bought the MZ-800 from someone. And faces with the same problem as before I wanted to make games again. But this time I started with "basiccode" versions 1 and 2 depending on the radiostation transmitting it and lending MSX / C64 books from friends and trying to make the listings work on my system.
In retrospect I was a porter before I knew what that was.

So lack of games made me become a programmer in the end..... Maybe I should start porting games to linux, before it's not a niche gaming platform anymore :)

I learned Programming Logic at 15's in a free government course. After that, I learned a bit of C++, Java and other languages with free tutorials on the internet.

But, I really started programming games with Game Maker 6, since it made things much easier than with the classic programming methods. =)

Well, I'm a little on the young side compared to y'all, but here's my story.

It all started in 2007, when a group of my friends and I started a FIRST Lego League team ([http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll](http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll)). I quickly got hooked on the drag-and-drop NXT-G programming, and that was my first experience programming. After that, I dabbled in some text-based languages for the NXT, and then took up learning HTML and Java through books and online research.

Since then, I've done mostly regular application programming in Java, and Rich Internet Applications in HTML/Javascript, as well as working as a website administrator.

I have repeatedly tried to program games, but none of the projects I've started have gained much traction and all kinda died out. My main problem is focusing on/learning an engine; I've dabbled with dozens, and I can't make up my mind.

It was a warm summer evening in 1982. Or was it a cold winter afternoon in 1983? It was a while back when dad bought a PC and me, a curious kid, started checking it out. Three games and a basic book where all that was there. Eventually my dad grew tired of me using his PC, so he bought an extra MSX machine. On that did more basic and jumped over to assembly.

So many of you guys got into it back in what I would consider to be the golden age for learning to program at home. The barrier to entry was far lower for tinkerers then than today. But what would I know?, I didn't even exist in the 80s.

For me, it was because I wanted to automate my backups with a batch script using robocopy. And the script got more and more complex as I added creature comforts. Then I switched to Linux and so had to "port" the script to Bash. Finally took some formal education in Python and C++. I'm not great at it but my initial learning experience has left me in love with interpreted languages.

I started making crappy HTML websites for no good reason around the age of 13 (early 2000's) and later started using phpBB forums. They taught me the basics of LAMP servers; installing MODs let me see how PHP worked and what it could do, and I got used to the structure and logic of PHP that way. Can't remember if I jumped straight into it, but I think I first added a few dynamic elements to my websites copy-pasting code from various tutorials, then started making simple browser-based "games" with PHP. Eventually I started working several hours a week on an asynchronous fighting/RPG game to replace one that had closed down that my friends and I had loved. I learned a lot and made some actually complex stuff, and got it to a playable state, but had to give up eventually because I developed something similar to RSI and I already work at a computer for my actual job so I had to cut keyboard use somewhere.

Since then I haven't gotten a chance to use PHP for much other than server-side operations on mostly static websites, but I jump on chances to write a bit of code, and I've gotten much more familiar with CSS and a little more comfortable with JavaScript. It annoys me a bit that I never learned anything that I could put to good use in actual software, to contribute to Linux with more than translations. Being able to look under the hood and submit my own patches would be great. (I know it's never too late, but I have several other priorities now and I would need to start at the very beginning.)

I started by modding PHPBB the forum software and just kept tinkering with other web scripts until I made my own :)

One day i might try some basic desktop apps.

I began my interest in coding in the 1980s when I was a wee nipper and we had such beasts as the BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum :-)
Got myself some C coding qualifications in 1992 and then went to work on the railway...

I started back in the times of the c64 with coding, first BASIC then Assember. Later on PC I learned C/C++ and little bit of Delphi. Today I work as developer using mostly C# for desktop applications and PHP/JS for web projects...

I began about 20 years ago with Quick Basic (MS Dos) and programmed a simple benchmark and other stuff. A Scientist teached me basic. Later I learned by myself with a book PHP (about 10 years ago). But I am still not a professional programmer, I only do programming sometimes when needed or just for fun.

I am trying to do science. And as science is about working with data, learning some data manipulation tools is a must for healthy mind. So I learned R, which is great for statistical stuff as well and can make nice images (few years ago I discovered Knitr, with which you can integrate R code with LaTeX and make even better documents!). But R is not all that great for text processing, so I learned Python for that and as a more general programming language.

Recently, I had to learn Java for Agent Based Model (I was told to use one framework, still don't know why, it is not helping with what I am doing that much if at all) and I learned C++ as R is nice, but slow for many tasks, but C++ can be relatively easily called from R or Python when speed is required (and modern development of R is pretty much in wrappers around high-performing C++ code).

Bash is awesome as well and a must as a lot of work is pipeline, preprocess data for program, run them through program and then postprocess output of said program. GNU tools like sed, grep, tr or cut are so highly optimized that even changes in huge files takes only a few second in comparison to similar problems in R/Python.

My father showed me Turbo Pascal 5.0 long time ago. On a Commodore PC-10 with an 8088 processor and MS-DOS 3.3. Wow, that's so long ago. But my fascination about computers just started. Playing games on them was only one aspect, but a big one of course ;)

At grammar school I've heard about C the first time, and thought, eugh... the code looks ugly. And from what I've seen, it was nevertheless quite similar to Turbo Pascal. I preferred writing BEGIN and END instead of curly braces though. But that changed over time, writing curly braces is much faster ;) Nowadays C is still big in business, Turbo Pascal evolved to Delphi, but personally I don't know anybody using it. And as I've also switched to C, it doesn't matter to me anymore.

Today I still program C and also a bit of C++ or java sometimes, but also Python and PHP. I've realized that programming languages have their special features to simplify things, but in general, it's just a tool to get your program to become true. The programming language doesn't really matter.
I still love programming, especially with the tools available nowadays. I love git, I love my editor Sublime Text and I love programming on Linux.

I probably started around 2010 when I was still in high school (Yes, I'm a baby) and started tinkering with HTML, I made some web pages, but never really did much with it. My first real programming language was Python, and that was a lot of fun :) Over the next few years I'd dig into How To Think Like A Computer Scientist (Python edition), get stuck, and come back to get a bit farther.

I'd later learn the basics of of C++ in college, though I didn't stick around long. Now in the present as I look into game development (something I've toyed with since I was a kid) I'm learning C# for working in Unity :)

Quoting: tuubiCopying C-64 basic snippets from borrowed copies of a magazine.

Same here. Though with no tutorials, and no knowledge of the English language back then, the most sophisticated things I ever did were things like modifying existing programs to produce some other kind of behavior. Like changing the data section of a program to play the tune I'd code in to play, while flashing the screen in different colors, etc.

I came back into 'programming' (yeah, in scare quotes) years later with shell scripting and awk. Somewhat encouraged by a tiny bit of proficiency at the shell I then worked through Jim Butterfield's marvelous book on 6502 assembly -- to finally figure out machine code that was such a mystery to me as a kid. Nowadays I'm trying to get good at C, merely as a hobby. Though proficiency with different kinds of algorithms on different kinds of data structure is something 'obliquely' related to stuff I'm supposed to be studying in a professional capacity (logic, philosophy).

By the way, learning awk is totally worth the effort, for anyone working in any capacity with text on a computer. Awk + sed + good grasp of regular expressions = productivity.

I used to read those Usbourne BASIC books in school. Never had a micro to program though, only had access to 386+ or those old Acorn machines - none of which I was aware you could actually program. I must have been around 10 at the time.

Later on in the teenage years I got a 486 given to me and started to experiment with the available tools, mainly qbasic, but I was also just starting to get the *idea* of programming languages and that there was more than one. But! My mother used to beat me for spending too much time on the computer and sooooo I turned in to a rebellious shithead instead of learning (there's also more to it than that, but that's the essence. Interests weren't supported).

I rediscovered computers towards the end of my teens and found some like minded friends. That cumulated in an adhoc game dev team using the Torque Game Engine (Tribes 1 engine). But then I went through a messy breakup and due to the cost of living ended up becoming a welder/fitter and not really doing much with computers.

Fast forward a decade (well, 7 years), I've gotten *out* of trouble, found a legendary girlfriend, quit work, and dived in to university to become a software engineer, coming up final year now. Programming was always what I wanted to do, now I'm doing it. It's been a heck of a ride.

I have the occasional pang of regret that I lost a possible 15! years of programming experience.

found a legendary girlfriend

Does that mean that she is unique? Do they respawn? Or are they even instanced for each player?

How was the bossfight?