from Hacker News

Ask HN: How many of you HNers learned to program for the first time in college?

by curious16 on 5/3/23, 5:40 AM with 4 comments

What was the experience like good and bad both? What was your first language? Would you have changed something if you were given another chance at life?

  • by mlhpdx on 5/3/23, 5:55 AM

    It doesn’t matter when you first learn because once you start, if you like it, you’ll never stop.

    I learned to program BASIC in 3rd grade and C in 7th grade. Then FORTRAN and PASCAL in college (Mechanical Engineering). Then C++, Lisp and C# at my first job. Then PHP and SQL, and later Python. Somewhere in there I learned assembler for x86 and some microcontrollers. I learned Java just so I could teach it as a volunteer APCS teacher.

    Just start; that’s the key.

  • by eucryphia on 5/3/23, 6:08 AM

    My first year University course advisor suggested I do the brand new Pascal programming course in ‘79.

    They enrolled a couple of hundred students but only had 5 card punch machines and one reader. One month of 24/7 programming by trial and error, which the lecturers wanted to avoid, only two machines survived, one had a broken ‘b’ key.

    This set me up for future success as future 1980’s employers always got the young bloke to run the computer.

  • by DamonHD on 5/3/23, 5:52 AM

    Not me: I learned (FORTRAN, BASIC, Z80/6502 ASM) at home while still at school (70s/80s).

  • by Pinegulf on 5/3/23, 6:12 AM

    I practice, yes. Real learning came when need to do something real came up. 'You, summer student, Do this for 2k rows.'