Everyone be like "I started programming at the age of 2 and my first ever spoken words were “for...each”".

We get it, child prodigy.

Don't mind me I'm just salty that I only discovered programming after taking the wrong course at uni which coincidentally had an extraneous Fortran module.

"started with my dad's commodore 64, after a few days I was able to create my own compiler and OS"

Yeh I felt the bullshit as well

Started decompiling NES games and built a mini pc when I was 8. I was bored in calculus

I discovered I really enjoyed programming after I coded my first pokemon game.

I started coding at 32 and I'm fine with that.

I just wanted a Skype bot because I was envious of IRC bots...

And free games... I made a random steam key generator (literally random letters and numbers in the steam key format) and let it run over night manually pasting in the code and clicking all the buttons n stuff as if keyboard input...

You know how many free games I got? Yep, none xD was fun though

@Hazarth I bet the reason you got 0 games was because your code only lasted a few seconds and could only try out a few codes before valve temporarily blocked code redemption for your account :p

I started coding to mod better physics into a god game. Did a pretty bad hack but works good enough and is faster than the speed of light.
Some Einstein was pretty upset about the non-deterministic on-demand quantum state calculations though...

To reverse this logic: if you've started programming at 5 and if you haven't founded several successful companies by 25, you're a failure.

Well I don't think there is anything wrong with people who found the field early. Doesn't mean they are prodigies but I think it it's getting more and more common. Here elementary school programs with programming intros are normal.

I was still relatively early but in my time the computing later internet where still uncertain. This is no longer the case.

@bananaerror

ha! Actually I was smart enough to put in a sleep of like 15 seconds... It was accepting codes the entire time!

Unless they shadow banned it. But I was also actually looking for free codes online (you can get them) so I sometimes added a real code when I was lucky to get one and it always worked so I doubt it...

Eitherway, was fun. I was so young and naive to think this would work xD

@ars1 and I started enjoying programming after making "hello world", and "random number generator"

I "started" coding at 12 (true story), but I recognize that that code was shit. Bubble sort O(n!) shit. I basically only used it to help myself with my math homework, so maybe 1 hour a week at most. I of course don't put it in my resume. I only started coding professionally at college.

I started by sorting and putting in order my ATCG nucleobases to code my own DNA so I could exist, then when I finished I decided to move higher on abstraction level. I was so small I don't even remember exactly when.

Started electronics when I was 2, wrote assembly first at age 3. Didn't actually know higher level languages were a thing, so I wrote my first language and associated compiler at 4, then decided that wasn't good enough, so then designed my own CPU architecture at 5. Wasn't the best thing going, but it ran Doom at 30fps.

...yeah. some did start early, but some also think it's a kind of trophy as to who started the earliest, so a fair amount of exaggerating is likely in force 😉

The most fun I had was building apps for my TI-84

I like going to the computer labs at the age of 7, I really liked the smell of the burnt dust and booting sound. Started coding university, my first game was minesweeper in VBA in excel. Now I work in the Android kotlin Devs of my company.