Just weighing in with another datapoint, I started programming at age 9 (in 1970) when my dad brought home some PDP/8 manuals that a client had given him, including a manual for a clunky language named FOCAL. I read through the PDP/8 books, eagerly staring at the "assembly language", but was particularly fascinated by this "FOCAL" thing, so I actually wrote some FOCAL programs on paper.

Dad saw this fascination with this programming thing, and figured out how to get me access to the high school's ASR-33 on the weekends so I could start programming for real. And after I had written and run my first real program (150 lines, no bugs!), I was hooked. I was going to grow up and be a programmer!

Of course, at the time, programming was used only by banks and government. Little did I know that 10 years later, individuals could afford computers, and 20 years later, I'd be having email conversations with people in Moscow in near real-time and publishing a best-selling book on a fledgling computer language. And 25 years later, I'd be convicted of three felonies for doing my computer job, forever altering my life.

So, I've been programming for 30 years, so at the core, I seem to "be a programmer", but I also play so many roles now, I try not to limit my self-definition that way. If asked on an airplane, I usually say "I'm a travelling stand-up comic", because that's the part of the job that most people can identify the easiest with.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker