http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=545360


in reply to I started with...:

Basic on an Apple ][+, age 11. My parents bought a computer and hired a high school student to teach me programming because the teacher at the high school refused to teach me.

Then in high school I took a programming class: same teacher, still in Basic. He was awful and I already knew more than he taught in that class, so I quit.

In college I messed around at the edges of programming, writing my reports in LaTeX and running Linux but still never really coding anything except some mangled C for a mud. Eventually I took a few CS classes (C++) and then worked briefly as a PHP programmer switching to Perl.