From james h hall, who probably ganked it from someone else.
How old were you when you started programming?
First attempt? 13. I failed. Miserably. I picked up C++ for dummies using my hard-won lawn mowing money and fired up the gcc compiler that came on the CD. My longest program was the first 'full program' from the book, which was converting Fahrenheit to Celsius. That's as far as I got. I just couldn't grasp the concept, so I delved into 3d modeling instead.
How did you get started in programming?
After I got into college as an Information Technology major, I promptly switched to CS when the associate dean told me that there was fiber running directly to the back of every lab computer. So that's my real programming start. Doing IT work also led to writing batch files: a lot of the stuff I was learning at the time was easily automated, and I was pretty lazy.
What was your first language?
C++, which was standard for CS majors at my university.
What was the first real program that you wrote?
A website, written in PHP. It was my first blog (long outdated and pulled down because I was an angsty teenager). I originally set up a newspro blog while all my high-school friends were busy playing with livejournal, but I wrote my own system after I took my first class in C++ at uni. It was up for four years and only got hacked once. SQL injection. D`oh.
What languages have you used since you started programming?
C++ to PHP. My first internship was doing VBA in excel, which morphed into ASP.NET 1.1 with VB.NET. After that our university switched to Java (making the first year of C++ and pointers worthless), and I switched to C#. After tasting the raw power that was the .NET framework, I couldn't go back to Java and it's shitty calendar classes. I bummed around ASP.NET for a while in C#, then switched into WinForms applications, using C#. My current job is in VB.NET, which I found out the day I showed up for work, not during the interview. Whoops. I would currently pick VB.NET as my language of choice.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Hell yes. Programming is awesome.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
You don't know anything. Nothing. Zero. If you're an arrogant prick, like I was, you will get slapped down and humiliated. Which was a fantastic learning experience, btw. Once you realize that you don't know anything, you can really start to see what the world of programming has to offer.
Print | posted on Thursday, August 14, 2008 11:13 PM