Pete Brown called me out on the Software Development Meme, so here is my response.
How old were you when you first started programming?
I was eleven years old (in sixth grade) when my parents got me a Commodore 64.
We got it on April Fools' Day, which that year happened to be Easter Sunday, on sale at Crazy Eddie's for an "insane" price. :)
How did you get started in programming?
This was in the days before pre-installed software, when you fired up the C64 and it did nothing.
The following week, my folks bought a word-processor and a spreadsheet program.
Naturally, I wanted games for it.
My mom told me to write my own games and the rest was history.
My first game was a moon lander clone and my last game on the C64 was based on the film 2010, which sold 2 copies.
I would get sued today.
What was your first language?
Commodore BASIC.
This was a simpler time, when filling up a screen was enough to impress people.
Two lines of code = big payoff.
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
What was the first real program you wrote?
I suppose it depends on how you define "real."
I hated math, but loved programming. Go figure.
I wrote a program to calculate the area and circumference of a circle. The C64 had a predefined value for Pi.
I also wrote a program to generate all the possible combinations of a phrase for a contest at school, where the one who came up with the most words out of a particular phrase won.
My C64 put me over the top and I (we) won.
Who says you needed a Mac to crush the other kids. :)
What languages have you used since you started programming?
Since 1984, I've used:
- Commodore Basic
- PL1
- Pascal
- C/C++
- Assembly (for VAX VMS)
- FORTRAN
- COBOL
- Prolog
- Informix-4GL
- Visual Basic (starting at VB3)
- Perl
- Lingo
- PowerScript (for PowerBuilder)
- ActionScript
- Java
- C#
- Javascript
- SQL (SQL-92, PL/PQL, T-SQL)
Most of the obscure and/or ancient languages were for coursework in college and I'm sure I'm leaving a few out.
These days, nearly everything I do is C#, with a touch of Javascript now and then.
What was your first professional programming gig?
I landed a summer internship after sophomore year at the help desk for the investment banking division of a major Wall Street firm.
When things were quiet, we were asked to do typically "summer intern" work.
My world changed when my boss handed me the dozen or so disks to install Visual Basic 3 to build out some help desk related apps.
At first, I was shocked that the line numbers had gone away. ;)
Soon, I was second/third level support and coding nearly full time.
My first professional app was "Beep Mail," a program that let you send text messages to alpha numeric pagers from your desktop.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Absolutely, it's been a rewarding career that has taken me places, both literally and figuratively.
It's been a career that's constantly been fun, stimulating, rewarding, challenging, and occasionally exhilarating.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Don't be afraid to make mistakes, just try not to make the same mistake twice.
Actually, be eager to keep making new mistakes and you'll be delighted where you'll end up.
What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?
There's nothing like that feeling when you finally figure something out or fix that bug that's been keeping you up at night.
It's also fun to work on cool personal projects too where you can try out new technologies/approaches/etc.
Who are you calling out?