Started back in 1982 with a Commodore VIC-20, BASIC language. Moved to a Commodore 64 in 1983, still programming in BASIC. Purchased my first Amiga (500) in 1987, learned 680x0 Assembly Language at home while learning Turbo Pascal in High School. Went through several more Amigas (2000 and 3000) then caved into buying a PC in 1992, learning C and FoxPro (through work). FoxPro programmer for 12 years, moved on to the .NET platform and C# in 2002... been a C# and C++ programmer ever since. Hobby Assembly Language programmer at home (6502/6507, 6809 and 680x0) on various old consoles (Atari 7800 and Jaguar). 39 now and loving XNA (was working with C++ and Allegro prior to this).

I got my first computer when I was just 6yrs old... a ZX Spectrum 48K. yeeah it was still 1981-82 back then. I copied the game code from magazines and then moved on to learn the basic language. Also did some programming on a ZX81 that came for free with a monitor my dad bought. A few years l8er I got an Amstrad PC 1512 to do some serious stuff with Trubo then Borland Pascal and also an Amiga 500 . I used obscure Nimbus machien in college and primitive PC's at University. Got a job and settled in developing financial software. It's been 12-14 years now. But I never stopped writing gmes as a hobby!

I started programming in C++ when I was 13, after I discovered the power of Google searching "how to program computers".

I'm 20 now, and I've picked up C#, PHP, and Javascript along with HTML and CSS, the latter two not counting as programming languages :P

i'm 18. I started with C when i was 16 and moved onto python just this year. I have since moved to c# most recently.

I'm turning 30 soon, started programming on my TI-85 calculator in high school, and have been dabbling on and off ever since.  I got into 3D games programming via Dark Basic, and now here I am.  Just wanted to introduce myself, I should have my first project (which I've been working on for quite a while while I lurked on these forums) ready for playtest soon-- exciting!

I think i was 15 or 16 when i started started with Turbo Pascal which evolved into Delphi at uni.

Did some delphi, Java, C++, C# and haskell during uni.

Currently using C/C++ for work and hobby things, although C# sometimes features aswell when i dont want to go through the hassle of setting everything up in C++ and just want to do something quick (mostly done for testing a shader idea i am having).

I'm 32, and I don't remember exactly when I first started programming except that it was with a language called Logo doing vector graphics with this little green "turtle" triangle and that I was a toddler at the time. (My Dad loves to gush to people with stories about how my pre-school teacher was all shocked an' shaken about me fixing her computer when I should've been learning to color or something. He recalls her saying something akin to, "What've you been doing to this kid?!" *lol*) I've worked my way through quite a few programming languages on various platforms since then. Mostly Basic, QBasic, C, etc... All for personal projects, user interfaces and games for my friends and family. Never turned it into a business or a career, though. Then I had a pretty long hiatus where I gave up on most computer and programming things due to personal issues that need not be discussed here.

At some point a while back I decided I "officially" wanted to be a game developer and was going to do what I could to figure out how to get into the business. I started working on some game ideas. (More in a writer/designer capacity, mind you.) I created some game design documents and got some people excited about them. But we weren't having much luck in the programming department and I was a bit busy with other aspects of the projects. I brought on some external programmers. They kept on disappearing or doing such minimal work over the course of a month or two that I could recreate it within 15-20 minutes myself using some basic tutorials on MSDN. So, I decided with my pretty solid understanding of C/C++ that the leap to C# wouldn't be all that great and being inspired by the promise of XNA and making games for my 360 (my favorite console of all time) I just dove back into it all this year. Turned out to be a little more of a struggle to pull off the games I really wanted to make doing things all by myself. So I put my major projects on hold to do some mini-games as I get a feel for XNA and what the whole Indie Games on Xbox 360 thing is all about. :)

Hey, first I would like to let you all know that im new to these forums, even to XNA. I was surfing the internet the other day for an engine that I could use to help get me started on a possible game development career.

Well I first started learning program when I was about 10. My pop introduced Visual Basic to me, even gave me a copy. I spent a while learning the code, but as I was obsessed with going out with my friends I had little time to properly learn the code. I only had a basic understanding.
When I hit 12 I found Gamer Maker. To me, this was the equivalent of a big time commercial game engine. From this program I got an understanding of the game development concept, which gave me the idea of making a game company when I grew up xD.
From there I was learning web design (html, css and java) in-which I had a sudden interest in. I made a few websites, even one for my dads company.
Then, finally at the age of 15 I found a proper game engine. An open source engine known as Blender. For most of the year I was learning how to Mesh Model, Rig, Animate and set up a game. This was when I got real interested in Game Development.

Now, im 16. I have still been using Blender since. But now I have found XNA and im very keen on learning it! Once I get the hang of the software and start re-learning C#, im going to try and make a small game. I dont have the money and euqipment to make anything too fancy right now. But hopefully I will progress from this small game onto bigger things. Well, thats the plan anyway.

Hmmm... Started when 12 with Scratch... and now I'm 15 and fairly good at c#. Yeah that's about all I can say

Figured I would chime in here seeing as I'm new, and there really isn't a proper place to introduce yourself on these forums.

I started programming when I was around 13 by teaching myself C.  Got quite a ways with that before I made it to High School and found out that they have programming classes.  Once I was there, I had to take a step backwards, because the first class was in QBASIC.  Naturally, since I had already been teaching myself C for the past year, I excelled in the class.  Also ended up taking a basic Web Programming class that taught HTML and Javascript.  My Sophmore year I moved onto the C++ class, but that was the end of the line for classes at my school.  Instead, I started leaving school to attend a local University to learn programming, including Java and Assembly.  Throughout this time, I had a very large interest in game programming, to the point that a friend and I wrote an entire 3D Game Engine in C++ and DirectX; textures, animation, levels, scripting, the whole bit.

Once I got to full-time college, I started looking into the Game Development Career path, and found a lot of very sad data; everything I read said that game programmers worked way too long of hours and got paid nothing in comparison to other software fields.  That was the breaking point for me.  Yes, I'd love to love my job but, being a new adult, I couldn't see myself working 80 hour weeks for far less money.  That and the fact that my fiance would have a very hard time moving away from her family, and the Midwest isn't a great place for Game Development Studios.  So, I moved on to completing a Computer Science Degree, learning LISP, Scheme and some other pointless languages, along with Java, C/C++, Assembly and finally some self-taught C# for my Senior Project.

After graduating, I moved on to work at IBM, get married and have a beautiful daughter.  I've always had a love for video games, and always will, which lead me to help head up a Forum based around Halo 3 and the level creation aspects contained within.  This is what really got me programming for myself again.  I learned a boat load of new languages to bulid new features for the site; PHP, MySQL, AJAX, etc.  After doing a couple years of that, I decided that if I'm going to spend my freetime programming anyway, I might as well do something I really love, and thus, here I am, a 23 year old, ready to conquer the gaming world once again.

I've dabbled in XNA in the past when it was first released, and I'm here to relearn all of that, plus a lot more.  I already have ideas rolling and I'm slowly picking up steam.
Like I said above, I'm mainly writing this to introduce myself, because I'd love to get to know all of you guys for both your wealth of experience and of course for some good times.

Sorry, that was a lot to read.  Congratulations if you made it all of the way through. ;)

14/11

I'm currently 18, but I'm programming since my 10. I started with BASIC (QuickBasic, I found that on one of my first computers). That evolved to VB6, VB.Net, and now, since a year of 2, C#. Why the switch? VB was enough for me, but the Mono version did not perform well at that time. And since I switched to Mac that time, I learned C#. Now I'm dualbooting my MacBook.  (WinXP/OS X Snow Leopard).

The reason why I'm started so early was because I was always attracted to creating stuff on the computer. Since I've got Aspregers and Dyspraxia, I couldn't make artworks or something, so I started programming. I've found an old book about QuickBASIC, started to read it, and started. My first programmes where extremely simple, but now I wrote a site for a major self aid group for people with autism in Flanders, which is almost ready to go in production. The site features a (self-written) forum, calendar, profiles, blog,...

That's about my history ;-).

Yvan

35/10 (ran out of memory on a borrowed ZX81 when trying to make a blackjack game)

44 / 17

Started on a Tandy TRS-80.  My parents could not understand why I wanted to spend all my saving on it.  I upgraded it to 16K of memory from 4K.  For those under the age of 20, that's not a typing error.  K = kilobyte.
The language was a form of MS BASIC.  I've spent a lot of time programming with intepreted or script languages of various types, however I prefer C++ and C#.

I am now 25, but I began programming when I was eleven years old or so using QBasic. Could not for the life of me figure out how to get graphics on the screen. Took me a year or two to figure out I had to change screen modes before trying to display pixels. Not to mention I was a hapless GOTO junkie and rarely used subroutines and functions--and when I did, I never did so correctly. I wrote more spaghetti code than I care to remember.

Was very resistant to moving to C++, in part because I hated puting a semicolon after everything, and also in part because I couldn't figure out how to generate a random number. This was before I really had any internet access, see, and things weren't always so easy to find back then. All the programming books I found focused on useless foreign concepts like classes and obtaining an hWnd. All I wanted to know was how to roll a random number! *sobs*

Oddly enough, now things have come full circle. I look at VB's good ol' IF...THEN...ELSE...ENDIF blocks with upper case formatting, full of blocky indentation devoid of curly brackets, and cringe. And I swear, the day it finally dawned on me what a class was for changed my life.

TheGrandHero:

I am now 25, but I began programming when I was eleven years old or so using QBasic. Could not for the life of me figure out how to get graphics on the screen. Took me a year or two to figure out I had to change screen modes before trying to display pixels. Not to mention I was a hapless GOTO junkie and rarely used subroutines and functions--and when I did, I never did so correctly. I wrote more spaghetti code than I care to remember.

Was very resistant to moving to C++, in part because I hated puting a semicolon after everything, and also in part because I couldn't figure out how to generate a random number. This was before I really had any internet access, see, and things weren't always so easy to find back then. All the programming books I found focused on useless foreign concepts like classes and obtaining an hWnd. All I wanted to know was how to roll a random number! *sobs*

Oddly enough, now things have come full circle. I look at VB's good ol' IF...THEN...ELSE...ENDIF blocks with upper case formatting, full of blocky indentation devoid of curly brackets, and cringe. And I swear, the day it finally dawned on me what a class was for changed my life.

Wow this sounds like a recap of the history of Jason and I... only we started with TI-BASIC (TI-99/4A) before moving up to QBasic, but the rest is the same!

Matthew Doucette:

Wow this sounds like a recap of the history of Jason and I... only we started with TI-BASIC (TI-99/4A) before moving up to QBasic, but the rest is the same!

Heh. I'd imagine it's the same for a lot of people. Without the internet, learning how to program as a hobbyist tended to be a trial-and-error process. I remember early on I gave up a simple project I was tinkering with because I ran out of variables--I didn't realize that they could have more than one letter in their name and I already had a% through z%. :(

This is a great thread!

I'm 32 and started programming when I was 26. Prior to that, I was a diesel mechanic in the United States Army for 8 years. While in high school I used to think computers were for dorks. Funny how life is similar to the internet: it's so easy to get distracted. Now, I spend the majority of my day writing business software and my evenings either playing pc games or tinkering with XNA, Silverlight, WPF, jQuery.....the list goes on!

Hi,

i am 31 and i started about 15 years ago with old good Atari basic :) 

I'm 28. I began programming in 5th or 6th grade, which I guess puts me in the 10-11 range.

I used to have a comadore 64 and remember coding on that, must have only been about 8 years old (maybe even younger).

Whilst studying for my GCSE I completed an evening course in C++ programing :)

I went on to study a BTec National diploma in Computer studies (2 year course) and then a BSC Univeristy degree in Computer Studies.

Im now 27 and still coding

I'm 26.

I am 22.

I started with HTML/JS when i was like 12-13 then stopped and forgot it all ( like 1 year and was only a beginner) now i'm 14 and hoping to learn C# then move into C++ (in college)

I started out using Game Maker when I was about 13. Then I started programming on a TI-83 Basic, then I learned about C# and XNA. Now I have a TI-84, and if I ever get around to it I might learn TI assembly. Now I'm 17.