pouët.net

Hi all.

How did you approach the code the first time?

Let me explain.

I've got my first video game at 6 (NES + Ninja Turtles), this make me want to be a game developper (at least i know how to code a bit now).

At 14/15, I've got my first computer, a friend has lent me a cd with some programs, and while browsing the CD I ended up in the Turbo Pascal compiler folder.

At this time I even didn't know what is those curious PAS files in the root folder, but I launched the IDE, loaded some .PAS file as asked by the open dialog, and started to read those strange line of english text.

Some minutes later, I realised that I had the weapons needed to start to be a programmer.

Maybe 2/3 month later i've started to write my first game a clone of pong

After, adults everywhere around me wanted me to be a chartered accountant while I show to them my programmings skills. I ended up in a BEP school you know where you put "bad" student in France...

I prefer not explain what happened after, but i'm a lot curious to know how you have put your hand on your first line of code :)

The first ever "hello world" was magic for me. How it xas for you?

I have a vague memory of visiting my finnish relatives when I was 6-7 years old, and one of my cousins showing me how to type my name and have it written back on the screen on some computer he had in his room. This is such a long time ago that I can't remember if I did it using a programming language, or just by using some kind of echo functionality available through the OS. Or what kind of computer it was, for that matter.

The first clear memory I have of fiddling with code was from some BASIC IDE on an Amiga 600. I didn't write any code of myself though; I merely tried out the various example programs that I found on the computer. One program I was particularly fond of what a speech synthesizer where you'd type in words or sentences and have the computer read them aloud - which of course led to me typing in just about any obscenities I could think of. I must have been 11 or 12 at the time.

The first time I actually wrote some code of my own would've been years later. Probably when I started highschool (i.e. at age 16). They had a 10Mbit internet connection, so I'd download QB, TurboPascal, Watcom's C compiler, etc. and bring them home with me on floppy disks.

Funny (or maybe not) sidenote: I copied the entire speech synthesizer program from the Amiga by writing down the source code using pen and paper. Then, a year or two later, I typed in the whole thing again in QB on a PC, expecting it to work. Of course, it did not :P

it's not a shame to have a BEP avec your "skills", as long as coding was also a passion aside.
i hope it is still a passion and/or your work today.

i'm not a strong developer, but i have another story. i learned everything in the opposite of anyone i think. people usually learn the basics first, how a computer works, memory, cpu and so on, and then learn how to code. this is not my case.

i started my computer studies (with a french multimedia school, and then a IT DUT) learning web technologies like HTML, PHP, JavaScript and so on, while i didn't have any knowledge of any programming language like C, Pascal, Basic, ASM etc. i just knew the basics of programming at that time (what was a variable, an object, a function, conditions etc.) and i was lacking a lot of knowledge on the basics of IT.

At home, i was interrested in learning programming on another language, at that time everything was talking about visual basic, C/C++ etc. so i bought books and.. i wasn't understanding anything. i was always "blocked" on some chapters for many years, like pointers in C, or later in the books when things got complicated with memory management, i simply stopped learning and did something else. it was really frustrating as i was keen in coding small things and look at the result.

i work today as a unix systems engineer, and since i started working on unix systems, i learned how to script (shellscripting, bash, perl etc.), and i had to learn the basics of unix systems, with system calls, forks, subshells etc etc. while learning those things, i read many documents and tutorials abou memory management, swap, CPU etc. and understood things i didn't understand 10 years before.

i started to code more advanced PHP and Perl at work, and i was also working on dbms systems (Oracle mostly) which made me consolidate my memory/disk IO knowledge.

i decided to grab my old C books agian and give them a try, it was much easier than before, but still not perfect. then i found another book on the web which seems to have a different approach of that language, and was explaining things easily, and bingo.

i finally understood after so many years what those damn pointers were, how (and why) memory allocation worked and so on.

like for many other things, i realized that i was just lacking knowledge on "basic" things, mainly on how a computer works; this was mainly due to my studies at that time, i was not focused on maths and IT at that time.

now, when i read an assembler tutorial, i can understand *almost* everything, and it really want to learn how it works and what i can do with it.

but i know theres a barrier which is going to be hard to pass, trigonometry/3D.
i forgot everything about the only maths i learned at school, so when i look at more advanced code with OpenGL, particle systems etc. it gets complicated at the moment.

My first code was done in BASIC on a ZX81. Guess that doesn't count as an IDE.
Did BASIC on C64 and GW-BASIC on PC...
I guess the first time I used something that could be considered an IDE was AMOS on Amiga. Or perhaps it was QB on the PC. Not sure which of the two I used first.
AMOS was the one where I did the first 'serious' graphics stuff though. Making scrollers, bob-effects and whatnot. With MOD music playing of course.

I've started also by typing source code from magazines into basic interpreter and looking how they do the stuff the program does... and the tex-articles (from the atari demo group) in a magazine got me started into writing assembly on the atari, there I could type in the code and do small modifications to understand what each command is doing. after I've learned the assembler basics I've started to disassemble intros to look how the more advanced stuff was done, besides looking through magazines to find good coding articles (back at the time c't in germany was really great).

regarding how to learn things best: try to find a person that knows what you want to learn and can really explain it well. for example in my opinion 3d isn't really rocket science, but you have to know some basic stuff to get the whole picture. doing 3d-dots can be easily done in 10-20 lines of code (c++) if you know what's important and why. nowadays everything is on the web, but you have to find the "right" tutorials and most of the time a person to talk to directly is much better imho.

so bull, if you need help with 3d, just contact me ;)

It's very pleasant to read such story :)

@Bull: I am working as integrator, and I use a custom language interpreted by our application to manage some really big data stream (not the PRISM thing :D), so i more or less realized what I want.

The great difficulty now is to level up... and be considered as serious ^^


Funny fact: when learning Pascal and Inline x86 assembly i've tested almost all possible value for changing screen resolution.

Some of them was "green" with weird resolution if I remember, and while doing this I was a bit scared to make my screen explode xD

Oh joy, a thread for nostalgia-masturbation...

nibbles.bas and gorilla.bas that came with qbasic were the first sources I read :D then I played around and used the help-function and I got caught by the fun of coding (= must have been somewhere around 1994/95.

In 1984, when i was 6 years old, my cousin got a c-64 ...some days later we´ve already been hacking in so called Listings off some german c-64-magazine, basically large HEX-arrays, with a checksum for every 20 bytes or sth alike. (The first listing had no checksums, as it was the editor including the checksum-test itself) Some more weeks later we had coded our first scroller in BASIC, haha. no more listings. I started to read Assembler-Tutorials short after, but at that age i couldn´t make my head around it...
...in 1989, i´ve been 11 then, i got my Amiga 500, some 2-3 months later i visited a skateboarder-friend of mine, when i entered his room he was sitting there in front of his Amiga, and guess what: He was coding! I immediately recognized what was going on, and directly asked him "could you teach me coding, please?!", even before i said "hello" ;) He then started to show me what the code was doing, step by step, at the end of the day he gave me a disk with a small basecode and SEKA-Assembler plus a book about 68000-coding (Data Becker, the good stuff!), saying "come back tomorrow and bring some code with CopperBars!". That´s how it went, i came back, brought copperBars, so we started our own Demo-Group that Day. At the end of the week we had a nice screen with logo, plasma, sinescroller, bottom-scroller and a Selector, basically could have been used as a PackDisk-Menu, but we never used that screen, we just learned from doing it :D

Pretty sure it was QBasic for me too.... back in like 2001 (!!). Sourcecode was from a book that I found in the library that had some BASIC code in it that did not translate directly to QBasic.

I did Amstrad BASIC > QBasic > Delphi > C/C++ > z80 assembler back on Amstrad.

1986, age 7, copying BASIC out of a kids programming book from the library, on a Poly (a New Zealand built 6809-based computer).

I've started to set programming sample books to ZX81 basic, because I've never succeeded to lauche a tape on it in early 80's, and at my 11, I've got a Thomson TO8. I've coded basic during 3 years making dungeon master clone on 8bits, and a graphical interface to produce 160x200 gfx with joystick and some other stuffs as the first demo ever seen original. Then I've runned with PC 286 and 486 coding PASCAL and ASM, pentium 90, pentium 133 coding ASM, and then pentiumIII 500 Athlon 1Ghz, Pentium 4 2.4ghz etc, coding C/C++.
Meanwhile I've changed my course of Informatics by Physics and do invent the first time exploration machine, and télépathies merging physics, animals and power of processing of informatics and a huge background of maths and a very numerous women seriously wets inspiring me.

Bought a used A500 around 1991 and with it I got AMOS. This is when we started learning english in school so not sure how I was able to read/follow the manual. Might have copied random code too see what happened or something.

First (graphical) game I remember doing was Bulldozer Racing where you could bet on which one finished first. Yep, that right, bulldozers... Why? Because my horses left a big fat trail behind 'em across the screen during the race and I didn't know why (was using PasteBob instead of sprites). So them horses were turned in to bulldozers and problem solved.

Got better over time and later switched to C, but guys like Archmage and Ra made me more interested in DPaint. I gave all my sources and manuals to a friend and forced him to start programming so I could do graphics instead. 20 years later he works at Microsoft in an other country and I'm still stuck here in our old hometown working with SolidWorks day after day.

So - fuckings to Archmage and Ra ;)

I remember dicking around with AppleScript when I was 6 or so. I didn't really know what I was doing... also using ResEdit to modify things in MacOS (and managed to make a custom boot splash screen).

Some years later, in school, I found an old-ish book about "Home Computers". In the back were BASIC listings. This shit was at the time already outdated for ages, but I was still curious about it, especially because I had an interest in old hardware anyway.
I copied several listings by hand, on paper, during breaks... and during class too, sometimes.

At some point in 2006 I bought a C64 and started messing around with BASIC, discovered the demoscene, and it all went downhill from there.

I got my first C64 short before my 6th birthday and when I was 8 years old I wanted to program my own computer games. Therefore I learned BASIC. Later I got a PC and initially worked with QBasic. That was also my first IDE. The first source code I read was some listing in the magazine "64er".

I got my first PC when I was 11. Kinda got interested in cracking, etc. So I got a few asm tutes, and began to learn assembler with MASM. I also played around with QB but never really bothered. In learning cracking, I finally stumbled upon the demoscene. Then I began to code demos (hah not so long ago). So assembler was getting too annoying to build complicated demo thingies in, and back then I had a mind to learn OpenGL (not anymore), so I learned C. this led to C++. And now I'm here.

So my first IDE would be winASM, and the first source code I read was probably a keygen template or something like that

When I was 10 . . . ish. I downloaded somekind of BASIC. I remember printing out the multiplication table. </thread>

They say my father was coding on Spectrum and I was the second pair of eyes debugging when I was something like 6 years old :P

I remember getting obsessed by computers when I was about 11, just reading like, Ladybird books on them or whatever. This is back when there were no computers in India whatsoever. Then I happened to buy an old second hand Personal Computer World magazine at a second hand magazine shop (all of which still exist today, btw!). That was when I probably saw code for the 1st time.
Later, I begged my mother into buying a Spectrum for me, and got into the game swapping scene at school. Learned BASIC from books, and likewise for Asm.

My first computer that could be programmed was a commodore plus4, so it would have been BASIC on that.. pretty poor.. thats where I learned the desire to make it work. there was a lot more info in magazines for people who had spectrums though (which is what i had *really* wanted that xmas.. :( ) We did a tiny bit of BBC Micro BASIC at school but it was pretty much just doing PRINT with some colour codes.

I never had friends who were into computers so I was totally isolated and without access to resources for what I had and didn't understand much.

Later on I got an Amiga 500 and 'Easy AMOS' then AMOS Pro, around that time I started college and was exposed to BP6 (borland turbo pascal 6) and some students I met there taught me more. After that I switched up my courses to do a software engineering course. I tried Dice C on the Amiga, but quickly switched to PC as thast what was used at college. I was taught C using M$ Programmers Workbench (PWB) at first, then Visual C 1.52. (Also learned COBOL *spits*)

Outside college work I was writing little games and demo type effects. (This is still pre- the widespread use of the internet and I still had no connection to the scene)

After this I got a job as a C/C++ programmer (1996) for a company that made devices that plugged into ISA/Serial/Parallel and later USB ports.

Because of this I have used every version of Visual C, and other C compilers like Watcom C, Turbo C, BP6 (again!) and Delphi, Visual Basic, as well as MASM (when windows drivers used to be written in ASM) to write both device drivers and apps that talk to the hardware.

(A lot of these other languages were due to the requirements of the customers requiring sample code)

...oh by the way, bull, I STILL haven't understood what pointers are! :)


so - you're not alone :)

A pointer is just a "roadsign" :)