I suppose I can't really speak for everybody but as a 20-something the story a lot of my friends and I had in common was programming our TI calculators. The language was simple (some might say...basic ba dum chh), it was easy to share programs with friends as text or via link and you had a built in packed audience of folks in classes that thought the things you figured out how to do were really cool. We started with simple school problem based programs then went on to more complicated things and then some went on to learn some c or assembly etc.
I think perhaps we might not be starting programming with computers directly all the time, but perhaps there will always be some object that younger folks will learn to program. Heck maybe the next kids will decide to program phones or connected home appliances or something.
I can honestly say TI calculator programming was my first foray into programming as well (I'm 25 now). I remember meticulously typing in a BASIC clone of Pac-man and having it not work the first few times I typed it in (I think it would take me nearly an hour each try). I didn't really program much after I stopped using TI calculators a lot until someone showed me tryruby.org and I found it interesting. Now, two years later, I work full-time as a programmer and have decided this will be my career. Funny how those little side diversions when you were but a kid can come back in a big way.
24. Even though we always had a computer at home, I never got into programming and spent most of my time playing games. (The learning curve was too steep, and besides, what could I possibly make that was better than the games I was playing?) Then when I got to college I majored in CS. Now I'm definitely interested in making games. :)
In my opinion, the abundance of dynamic and interpreted languages, powerful tools, programmable hardware, and the internet make getting into programming WAY easier than it was before.
But even you - a smart capable person who likes computers - didn't do so because you already had all the games you needed.
Those home computers? You load a game, or you start programming. Since loading a game often meant fiddling around with a tape cassette and cable, and a few minutes hoping it would load, it's easy to see why people decided to try to code themselves.
I know abstraction is a good thing. I know it's powerful and etc etc.
But there's something nice about being able to squirt data to an address, and know it's coming out the parallel port, and having a hokey resister-ladder DtoA converter hooked up to turn that data into music. Or to have a single instruction to draw a pixel.
As a counterpoint, I'm 20 and I started programming exactly because I was playing around with extending a game (Neverwinter Nights was the game), which involved using the built-in tools to make new levels/worlds but getting elaborate behaviour required scripting in a C-like language.
I remember being utterly confused by what a statement beginning with "while" did, but eventually I was reasonable enough to mostly implement a (very weak) checkers-playing AI.
This then lead to programming Lego robots in C, which was pretty neat. (Actually, thinking about that, the first programming I did was using the graphical LabView thing that Lego provides for Mindstorms robots.)
23. I started when I got bored of the games on the computer my parents had at the time, and I started opening random programs and eventually ended up in the QB3.0 editor. After early attempts at using it as a word processor failed (it kept complaining about syntax errors when I moved the cursor off the line) I asked my dad, and he showed me how to do
PRINT "Hello from the Computer"
And I worked my way up from there with the help system, and a lot of trial and error.
It helped that our parents limited us to 30min/day of playing games, but were okay with me spending more computer time programming (or playing my own games, though I rarely did that. Making them better was way more fun than actually playing them).
I don't remember how old I was at the time, but it was definitely I was using Windows 3.11 (it was installed, but you couldn't run any decent apps when all your RAM was used up by win). By the time we got a Win95 computer (which in fairness was probably in '98 or '99) I was pretty decent at BASIC.
I continued to play around with it 'til I started learning C++ in maybe 2003? Luckily prolonged exposure to BASIC doesn't seem to have done any lasting damage :)
26 here. I didn't get into programming until a couple years ago.
As a kid, I was never really exposed to programming. It wasn't offered in middle school or high school. It just so happened that I was never prompted to try it. I majored in something non-technical, and didn't write my first 'for' loop til I was 24.
Which is a shame, because as a kid I totally would have loved it. If only there was one class, one teacher, one person, somewhere, telling me to try programming -- I would have tried it, most likely, if someone pushed me.
Oh well. As a grown up, I've discovered programming, I have a job doing programming, and I love it.
On my playstation 2 I had a demo disc that had a YaBasic compiler. I wrote game code with my controller. I used other people's source code to make pong and pac-man, and had little understanding of what I was doing - but still managed to change the colours. It also introduced me to manually checking the syntax of the code. http://members.iinet.net.au/~jimshaw/yabasic.me.uk/faq/
30 here. For me it was websites and discovering that you could see the source code. I thought it was amazing and instantly wanted to learn how to make one. I found out my ISP offered free web space, stumbled on to Arachnophilia, discovered Usenet and haven't looked back since (this was all around 1996/97).
I couldnt say for commonality, but for me writing scripts in notepad for a game emulator to make new items, using a series of tutorials and articles that had been turned into a .chm file because their coverage was so good.
23. My foray into coding started by playing with game's level editors (such as Tomb Raider, Elder Scrolls and Warcraft 3). There was a lot of visual abstraction, but you could go deeper down if you wanted to. Then onto Game Maker. It was actually cool to see all my 'code' going from visual blocks in it, to just using the built-in script (over a series of games). Learned a lot from it!
22. I started at 7 or 8 with Stagecraft Creator, which is a visual programming-ish thing. Then I moved onto to BASIC with Learn to Program BASIC. I have a friend who started with LTPB too.
I started at age 6 or 7 by trying to mimic the command lines printed by my parents' first PC XT's AUTOEXEC.BAT (which lacked "echo off", for which I am eternally grateful), then checking out adventure books from my elementary school library where part of the story required typing in and running BASIC code.
I was also given an Atari 130XE by an uncle that booted to BASIC, explored GORILLAS.BAS when DOS 5.0 came along, etc.
24. Dad worked at HP, so that helped: started at around 6-7ish years old with a 286 that had Qbasic. Moved on to QuickBasic 4.5, then some other Basic variants (Rapid-Q and even CorelDRAW's scripting language), C, PHP and JavaScript, then Python, which is what I still mostly do.
mid-30's, I have the same story, started programming when I was 8. Had these nice colourful British introductions to programming with cartoonish robots all over the place and full BASIC programs to type out.
