Why and when did you learn programming?

In 2001 I started when an old Linux Guru taught me the first few lines of Code.

How about you?

I was taught visual basic and didn't understand.

I was taught C++ and I didn't understand.

I was taught C# and still I didn't understand.

I was taught Mozart/Oz and I think I went mad...

In my final year I wanted an auto installer to automatically download and build new source distributions of packages my distributor didn't provide.

So I just built one with Python.

I learned to program by simply wanting to achieve something and learned what I needed to along the way.

When I was close to 10 year old dad got a PC with DOS and nobody knew how to work with it. Dad went to computer courses and brought lecture texts which had DOS commands. I started trying them out to see what they would do, then I started combining them in a batch file, then later we got a better PC and I got Visual Basic 6.0, and then from that... many many sleepless nights trying to figure out how some programs work and how some programming languages do things. And after many years... yep It's still interesting to do. :)

When I was 8 years old, my dad bought a computer on windows 3.1, I was amazed. How everything is printed on the screen by just plug in into electrical outlet? And when I move the mouse this thing on the screen is moving !
Unconsciously or not, I choosed to study computer science to answer the questions of this child in me.

It started when my boss asked me if I knew MS Access. (2008)

I needed something done which couldn't be done with a macro so I tried VBA. Then the virus really started to kick in. It was fun.

I tried VB.net after that (2011), I learned it to use with AutoCAD but all examples are C#

So since 2012 I program in C# with AutoCAD.

Why? Because it's f******g addictive 😁

At my college (pre uni in the UK, must be about 7 years ago now) there was a hardware and software course both running side by side, I took the hardware course. There was a little bit of programming on the hardware course, just to interact with things like controller boards etc. From there I got an interest in software development and luckily for me, the next year the two courses merged into the generic "computer science" that we all know and love. That got me into the basics of it, the rest all came when I started my first dev job. They taught me so much!

Well, I didn't start by coding...
When I started discovering the joys of pc gaming I wanted to play more different games. Just try them all out. But I was 12,i didn't have money, my parents didn't want to buy new games constantly so I had to pirate them. Games tend to crash, and a whole lot of different stuff started going wrong so I learned to fix my computer and my games. So I started doing troubleshooting for others, after a while this became boring but as I couldn't concentrate on anything but computers, I tried out coding and I was fascinated by it. And here I am now, working as a web developer, studying application development. 7 years later and still enjoying every part of it.

I've been dabbling for a while but only seriously started at 18 (last year). I started because it worries me that we have all this amazing technology at our disposal and the vast majority haven't the foggiest idea how it works! Also as younger people start studying programming as a compulsory topic, those of us who don't know will be left behind.

When I was 17, to fix a bug I my favorite pc game. I couldn't, and then decided to rewrite the game from scratch (the textures were already reverse engineered by others). I suspect you feel coming that I made rookie mistake number one: underestimating project size 😁

The usually story, I wanted to get with girls so I started learning JavaScript.

I learned html and css when I was 12. I really loved how cool it was to see the source code of my favorite websites. Then, I stopped. I don't know why, but I never tried anything until this year. I'm 23 now - had my first contact with programming and I'm loving it!

I got introduced to the term "Programming" when I was 17 or 18. As I my Mother Tongue is Bangla, I found a Bangla website on Python and started taking lessons from there. But for some reason I had to stop at a time. Then after a while I started messing around with some other languages like C, C++, C# etc. I really liked C# that time but I had to know basics of Programming, so I learned C. Then I tried to learn C#. Now I am an Undergraduate Student of Computer Science and Engineering and I still love C#. I'm currently taking a course from MVA on Universal Windows Platform. If you ask me what was the reason behind learning Programming, I'll say, I always loved everything about computers and I wanted to know more. That's why I started learning Programming.