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I started with basic on the "Adam" & some other kind of computer.  I actually tried to create a 2d graphical game with it in 1986.  Utter failure!  All the pokes/peaks and writing each and every pixel to the screen had me confused.

Then after a good 6 year hiatus of just using computers, I started my degree in CIS.  C, Cobol, DBaseIV, Smalltalk and some self taught C++ (It was the new thing) were amoung the languages I was using then.  

During one of my DBaseIV classes , I was told that there are no companies out there that use assembly language anymore.  I found out how wrong this was, when I got my first job as a mainframe 3270 assembly programmer!  Worked on a huge CRS system.  There was probably close to 1 billion lines of code.  It has been worked on for 30+ years.  1 line code changes took weeks to research that you weren't breaking something downstream.

Eventually I transitioned in the company in my 9 years there, to C on 3270, then eventually into the PC dev group.  There I used MFC/C++/C/Javascript/XSL/Com on a large PC project.  (If you ever go to a travel agent and have tickets issued, even electronic ones, there is decent chance your using some of my code.)

Finally, I learned C# and had a mini project to use it with.  Not long after that, I switched companies and was able to use C# full time.  (Never looking back too!)

At the moment, my wife and me are in a OK financial spot, and I quit my job many months back to persue game creation. (I've come full circle.)  The first month I was using C# with dx 9.  But then I found about XNA.  It's hard to work the long hours I do, without making any money. 

gorky:

At the moment, my wife and me are in a OK financial spot, and I quit my job many months back to persue game creation. (I've come full circle.)  The first month I was using C# with dx 9.  But then I found about XNA.  It's hard to work the long hours I do, without making any money. 

Well, I hope you & Z man make it.  Its inspiring to see guys my age starting over.  Gives one hope you know!

Best,

Byron

Byron Nelson:

Well, I hope you & Z man make it.  Its inspiring to see guys my age starting over.  Gives one hope you know!

Best,

Byron

Thanks!

One must always have hope.

 

Hi,
    I began when i was around 11, where someone who lived across the road from me gave me a visual basic 4/5 (i cant remember) book and i had a little dabble in it. Then a couple of years went by and then i got involved in some PSP programming which then gave me experience in C++. Now, i am 17 and i am pretty good at Pascal and now learning C# for XNA.

    I think it's great how people start from a young age, as you carry a lot of life experience. Funny that i'm writing this after i have just done a talk with some of my computer science class, and probably just introduced a couple more into the XNA community ;)

    Thanks for reading...KeegY

Im  a noob i started when i was 16 and am now newly 19. I know some VB, Actionscript and am now learning C#. I will have to learn C++ for school pretty soon.

I'm now 25, and I started programming when I was 23.

My first language was Java, and because of this, it is still my favorite.  I have programmed in C++ and PHP as well.  I don't really like C++, mainly because it feels like a slow, old version of Java to me...Java took many of the best parts of C++ and left out the parts that felt awkward(OOP doesn't feel right in C++, feels like it was just tacked on as an afterthought to C).

I heard about XNA when Microsoft announced it, but kept putting off looking at it because I'm so busy with school and work(despite my wanting to work in game programming after graduation).  I finally downloaded it last week to take a look at it, thinking I might write a game using it for my senior project, and decided that I love C#(yay for Java syntax!), and I love the XNA Framework that you can use. 

So...I'm a beginner in C#, but it feels very familiar because of the syntax it shares with Java.  It also makes me very excited about game programming, because I had been told once by the ArenaNet programming team when they launched Guild Wars(the developers hung out at the retail store where I worked at the time, so cool!) that C++ was the programming language I would need most often for game programming...and I really can't stand C++.

 

I also can't believe how young some people were when they started programming.  I first thought about it when I was 15, but had no idea how or where to start...then I got distracted by my love of Physics...it wasn't until my Junior year of college that I went back to programming(and then only because of a programming class I was required to take for my Engineering degree!)

Thought id chime in lol.

I don't remember when I started coding. About 13 I'd guess. It was HTML/JavaScript. I learned C/C++ and did a Q2 engine hack and game. Looking back on it, I basically just spliced other ppls code into the project, modded a few things, and called it my own.

Im 23 now and work as a sharepoint developer so I'm decent with C#/ASP.Net/SQL/etc. I agree for the most part with "once you know a language, learning a new one is easy". SQL isn't very similar but thats because its code to pull info not do something. Also assembly isnt OO (ive been debated on that fact) so the syntax is harder to grasp. I remember having to code binary in college >_< took me a week to do a basic sorting algorithm. Its not that it was hard, it just takes so long to reread your own code its painful.

I find the constant drive to keep learning is/was hard for me. I make things into big accomplishments when they are really small tasks. Like learning something new and making a whole project around just that one feature.

Unfortunately, game programming hasn't worked that easily for me. It's such a big step from my business type programming. I make my goals too big and rarely make them. I wind up giving up and coming back a year later. Hence why I havent made a game since 1999.

I started at around 11 or 12, pretty simple stuff, I think I used Liberty BASIC (just a funky version of BASIC with colour coded syntax and the like) to make a GUI calculator with clickable buttons and things like that, and just stuck to BASIC and a bit of HTML until I was around 15, as OOP scared the heck out of me back then! (looking back, I have no idea why...)

'Course then I moved onto "proper" programming after I went to an Open Day at the University of Hull, where I'm now studying. They were giving out free copies of the "C# Programming" book used in the first year, so I promptly took a copy and spent the next few weeks heavily immersed in it.

Thanks to that I then dived into the world of C++ (which isn't TOO different to C# anyway) and from around November last year I've been into XNA, and like to think I'm pretty good with it now. So basically at the moment I'm "into" C#, C++, XNA ooo and OpenGL, started learning that as well.

I'm 25 years old and I started to "program" when I was 14. I made a very simple text-based adventure game by using MS-DOS batch files and ASCII "graphics" :-D Now I'm about to become a Computer Engineer, when Aran, my XNA thesis project, is finished.

18, started programming with C++ when I was 11.

I'm 46. I sure hope somebody older posts. I can't believe I'm the oldest sofar.

I don't remember the year, it was in the late 70s & I was in high school. My friend bought a motherboard that I think had a 6502 in it and we screwed it and a keyboard to a piece of plywood. We programmed in a version of BASIC and were able to get a dot (4 pixels) to bounce around the screen. Kind of pong like. We thought we were real cool because we made an island in the middle of the screen that the ball would bounce off.

I was 16 (1981) when I first started programming.  My high school had 3 TRS-80 Model III's, and very early on I was doing block graphics to go along with my basic programs.  I bought as many books about programming as I could afford, and had a lot of fun.

When I was in the USMC (1983), I was stationed in Monterey, CA, and the rec center there had a couple of Apple IIe's which you could sign up for hour blocks of time to use.  I also had a friend with an Atari 800, and I would write basic programs for both.

In Texas (1984) I bought myself a Commodore64 with a tape drive, and started writing basic programs, and eventually bought a disk drive, and the Commdore64 assembler, and did quite a bit 6802 assembler.  I was interested in Ham radio at the time, and built myself a program which would watch the joystick port for input, and print the translated english and morse characters on the screen.  It took an old broken joystick cable and used it for input.  I had a machine which could tell me how well I was keying my morse code characters.

Around 1988 (I was in the Army by then) I took an NRI Correspondence course called Microcomputers and Microprocessors, in which I build my very first PC (components shipped to me bit by bit). It had an orange Hercules mono graphics and V20 chip. Wow!  Around the same time, I met a guy who was doing C programming, and he convinced me to check it out.  He gave me a copy of his Turbo C 2.0 compiler, and eventually I moved up to Turbo C++ 3.0 (DOS).  Also around this period I started doing xBase programming DBase III, IV, and Clipper.

In 1993-94 I was out of the military and settled in Las Vegas, NV, where I found jobs doing Database programming xBase, Clipper, and also started learning Windows (3.0 and 95) programming in Visual C++ and Visual Basic.  I worked in many different industries, and also worked on proprietary voice response systems and phone switches which had their own languages and scripting platforms.  Also during this period, I was learning about networking and serial communications programming.

Around 1997-1999 the internet was becoming popular and I started learning web development and web applications as well as doing some game programming in Visual C++ and Visual Basic (not very performant for games at the time -- 5.0).  I also moved into MSSQL database development writing sometimes very complex stored procedures for my jobs.

Since that time I have done most of my work in Java/.Net, mostly VB.Net and am now just starting to become proficient with C#.  I have written all different kinds of database and console/forms applications for mostly PC computers.

I have recently started developing a game engine which sits on top of the XNA framework and makes it much simpler to build games and try out game ideas.  Its currently in a very alpha state, but hopefully it will become more mature as time goes on. I have put up a portal at http://www.logartsol.com/FLC if anyone is interested. 

I am now 43 years old, and have never lost my love for developing programs and systems.

I started when I was 7, and that was in 1989 on an 8088 with QBasic 2.x I believe. Moved up to the full-fledged QuickBasic 4.0 and then 7.0 a couple years later. I played around with that off and on until I was 15 then I started teaching myself the basics of C++, which I did for another 6 years until I went to college for game software development. I've been using C++/C#/XNA for the last couple of years.

I'm 32 and started programming back in the days of the rubber-keyed 48K ZX Spectrum so I would have been about 11 when I started.  Self taught myself BASIC using trial and error(!) as the good old Speccy's keywords were written on the keys and just one keypress away.  Took me a while to work out what POKE and PEEK were for though.

I won't bore you with the rest of my programming history (although I did own a SAM Coupé at one point!) but am trying to now find time (and motiviation) to write some games in my spare time but it is tough sitting in front of a PC all day writing code then going home and doing even more of the same.

Time for a career break maybe...

I started when I was 7 on HTML (hardly a language...). I played with that until I got bored, since I assumed computer programming was the same as making stuff in HTML. I stopped messing around with computers for the most part for a year or so because my parents bough me a Lego MindStorm. I did a little bit of D&D "programming" with that with the crappy IDE Lego provided, but I mostly used the remote control.

Then when I was 10 or 11 I read an article in a Game Pro about people making home brew games, and I was suddenly inspired again. I went looking for a program to help me make games, passing by all the C and C++ IDE's because they were "too hard to understand" and none of the "Hello World" based tutorials were helpful (I still hate those things. Most are completely worthless!). Eventually I found something called Game Maker. Since it's an interpretor rather than a compiler, it ran incredibly slow. It had an easy to use D&D interface, one of the blocks being a code block which you could use to manually type in code. The thing had its own language built in, "Game Maker Language," which is kind of similar to C#. All in all, it was a crappy program. The one good thing it did teach me, however, is the type of logic and thinking required for programming.

So I stopped using Game Maker when I turned 14, as the thing kept aggravating me. It ran slowely, crashed all the time, and had bugs in simple computations (every once in a while it would get 1+1 wrong, for example. That simple of an error was rare, but multiplication and division were more common). I had taken a liking to spriting in the mean time, though, and became quite an accomplished spriter. I did that until I got sick of it when I turned 15. I began taking up programming again, though only as something to do when bored. I dabbled in C and C++. I remember that I made a simple quiz game.

Then when I turned 16 my brother told me about an idea for a game he had and about XNA and C#. I started taking a look at it all, and began planning many of the algorithms I would use in the game. Unfortunately my computer at the time only had onboard graphics processing, so it wouldn't run XNA. I used a C++ IDE called, I think, Bloodshed, to test the algorithms I planned on using the game. I never got them to work, though, as I never figured out how to do a graphical representation of what was going on and I was unable to debug them.

I finally got a new computer as an early birthday present (or rather, $200 of it was paid for by my parents), so I began working on the game.

Tomorrow I'll be 17.

hello there

i started in programming in 2003 or 2004.. im currently 24 years old.. i started with VB6 just a little bit, then moved to C#, tried C++ and failed, then used delphi for a while, then tried C++ again and failed once again and now i got back to C# because i got interested in game dev and xna

i have never been a full time programmer, just a hobbyist.

overall i have programmed in delphi the most of the time and then C# in second place

currently i have no intentions to try C++ never again hahahaha C++ is not really my thing hehehe :o)

Mmm, for me I started programming HTML at 10 because of Neopets [neoshops, heh]. I moved on to all the standard Web Programming stuff: Javascript, XHTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, XML, XSLT.

Then I met Flash Actionscript, which deviated me towards Game Programming. And when Actionscript wasn't fast enough, I jumped to Java, before settling down on C#.

Now I use both Flash and C#, having pretty much abandoned all the effort of learning Web Programming. Hopefully I'll learn C++ and HLSL, the former to let me understand and use InterOp to link all the C++ libraries out there. :p

Bapa:

21h, anyone? =P. I have a habit of digging down in to the nitty-gritty, and usually for no good reason.

haha  *nod**nod*

I suppose I started programming when I was...10 or 11ish?  GW Basic on MS-DOS 2.11!  I actually did an odd sort of jump from GW-BASIC to 8088 Assembly inside "DEBUG", and had some fun working with the DOS and BIOS calls, writing very simple programs.

In middle school I was introduced to Turbo Pascal, and used some code a high school student gave me to teach myself the syntax, etc...  Moved on to C++, C and Java in college.

I program professionally, but in a sort of assembly driven C...  It is quite scary.

I picked up XNA just recently and figure this should be quite a blast.  Still need to learn C#, but I figure it shouldn't be too bad. ^_^

Currently I'm 25, on revision 6 ^_~

i'm 30, started programming at 18 when i started my computer science degree. started with pascal and java, did some c, graduated at 23 and worked my way up java enterprise and complex web application development and currently for 2 years been using php, done some c# from .net also.

c# is more to my taste, and i love the 360 so when i saw xna come out i had to try it out in last years' dbp. now trying again. i'm no hardcore games developer but xna dropped the previous barrier to entry for me (c++/directx), so i'm happy :)

I am 22! I guess I really started programming at the age of 20...

When I was in highschool (level age 18), I spent about 4 days learning HTML.. That's why I'm not counting it..

Anyways, I started learning programming when I was 20 when I started out at DeVry's new Game & Simulation Programming courses. It sounded cool to me (you know, because I've been a gamer since I was alive!). Anyways, since it was a new program, they decided to start us out by learning assembly (oh that was f'ing fantastic! ....) So I got to enjoy doing...

drawhoriz:
  int 10h
  inc cx           
  inc al
  cmp cx, 370            ;checks for end point
  jnz drawhoriz

  mov cx, x_vert
  mov al, colour
  mov dx, y_vert

...yeah, it doesn't make sense does it? Anyways, I learned enough to draw parabolas and different colored triangles and squares.. yay! After that, I took a class in C# (real basic stuff) then learned C++ in OpenGL on my own (with the help of NeHe). From there I started learning some gaming concepts and thought of some ideas... while wishing I knew Object Oriented code.

After awhile of nobody knowing anything and not being able to help me. I decided to play World of Warcraft. Then I got too lazy to play it so I started botting. I learned a bit of Lua from that and made some Paladin grinding routines (which was pretty cool to watch the game play itself :))  <--(zomg double chinned smiley!)

After that, I took a class in object oriented code using C#. That helped me a bit. I learned some pretty cool stuff. And of course, I dropped out of school soon after the semester ended! After awhile of bumming around, I recalled attending GDX in Savannah, GA and meeting Brian Keller from XNA. Then I thought, "hey, it shouldn't be in Beta anymore!" So here I am!

I'm currently an unemployed (hopefully not for long) dropout that lives with his parents! How much cooler can one get!?

Well, I've always dreamed of making my own video games someday and I'm really determined to freakin do something. I may not have the experience as some of you, but hopefully I can play catch-up and pick at some of your knowledge! You know you wanna share! Sharing is caring! ;)

I was around 12/13 I believe? I started with GW Basic, and later learned Ti 83 basic language. from there I moved to C++ when I was 15 at ace computer camps. Took a break for a long while...then when I was 21/22 did VB6 in college (sadly they did not have .net at my school) then moved to some lotus script.

Now I am very much into C# and XNA. I am 24

I got a computer when i was 15. but i start programming in 19.C++,C#,JAVA and C.

And  work with .NET technologies like XNA,ADO.NET,ASP.NET,WPF,MS Robotic studio,SQL Server,Speech .

I `m studing right now,and hope learn more .NET .

 

Imagine cup Semi finalist

http://uditha.wordpress.com/

Hi, I started programming when I was 12 and 3/4ths with C++ (gave up after a few weeks and went to something easier).  Now I am 15 and am fluent with VB and am learning C#.  I also am fluent in HTML and am learning PHP.

Hello there.

Well I started programming around 14 I think. It was with Pascal and I tried to make games with that. Lol !

Now I'm nearly 25, I'm working as computer engineer. I'm used to PHP, ASP, C, C++, C#, Java, Flash/Flex and more.

I started with 12 or 13 years with an ATARI 600XL (http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8bits/xl/xlspecs/600xlspecs.JPG) and BASIC with a cassette tape drive in 1987. I still have it and it still works, also I have to say the design is still great ;) - well of course at that age I started typing off games out of magazines like Donkey Kong and attempted to write some stuff/experimenting on my own, too.
Then I had a C64 for a while which I used the same way as the ATARI, although there were of course more friend I could... uh... borough games from...
Then my brother had his first PC an Commodore PC10-III one of these computers with endless memory 640kb and a hard disc we never would be able to fill 20 MB - according to the sales guy. I did know more about that thing than he did, but it was his.... but I had an 80286 not much later and it had a sound card, too. During that time I learned Borland Pascal in school and made my first attempts writing a game (what else at that age). I still remember how stupid I started ;) It was like: OK, the graphic memory begins at that address, so why don't I just go ahead and write bitmap data into that memory. That had some effect, although not the desired one. Well and all the pain during that time with allocating memory in pages of 16k and so forth. As I figured that Pascal would be too slow for a 2D scroller, I learned assembler to use it as inline code. I never finished writing that game, but I guess I learned a lot. Next to Pascal I started then learning C by myself and then with 17 and with my first brand new Windows (3.11) I switched to Visual C++ 1.5 and C++ as a language. At school I had to learn Prolog for some reason, never used it since then. For a company closeby I wrote a little demo of a user interface in Delphi and got a job a couple of weeks before I started studying computer science. I was working more than studying, but somehow I finished university, too - just took a couple of years. At work I had a nice PDP11 with hard discs as big as the lits of a trash can. I had to learn Fortran and translated the fortran code into C++ to run on DEC unix machines and also programmed a Windows client with a graphical user interface written in Visual C++ 1.52 interfacing to the databases on the unix machines. At university I had to learn Beta (some stupid artificial language) and Java.
Well and after that at work I was mostly involved with database programming and my computer language journey went over Java, PL/SQL and now finally to C# - a great language btw.
Luckily I still have to tackle very interesting problems all the time, so that I am still fit in math and efficient algorithms - and maybe, one day, if I ever find the time, I will write a game, too :D