7 ms·

"I've been programming for a long, long time. Went to college for it when I was a pre-teen." Yet you don't tell us how old you are, so it's hard to get a grasp

by hsitz 5y ago

"I've been programming for a long, long time. Went to college for it when I was a pre-teen." Yet you don't tell us how old you are, so it's hard to get a grasp for how long you've been programming. As someone who first started programming in 1979, I notice that there are plenty of people who say they've "been programming a long time" who weren't even born when I started programming. This isn't a criticism, just a comment that we don't really have any idea how long you've been programming. I can picture a 29-year old saying the same thing you did. Time is relative, something that becomes more and more clear, I think, the older a person gets.

minitoar 5y ago
Going to college for programming must mean they are quite young indeed. When did colleges even start offering programming degrees? Unless maybe this is some sort of vocational college.
- musingsole 5y ago
  Young is relative... Computer science degrees have been available in colleges for 20+ years
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    20+ is technically correct. NC State was celebrating 40 years of CS in 2006 or so and they weren't the first. CS degrees have been around since the 1960s, so 50+ years at this point of CS as a separate degree program in the US. Apparently Cambridge offered their first CS degree in 1953.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      Yes, but they took quite some time to spread to the whole country and to every major university. That didn't really start until the 70s and 80s (in line with when NC State got established).
    - uncletaco 5y ago
      My graduate school's CS department is older than the university it now belongs to.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - arethuza 5y ago
    Manchester University has had a CS department and degree since 1965: https://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/about/history-and-heritage/ https://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/about/history-and-heritage/
  - astura 5y ago
    Woah there, I was studying computer science in college 20 years ago and it wasn't even close to a new degree program then.
    - zikzak 5y ago
      Too be fair, when I say 20 years ago I'm thinking "the 80s", then I remember that's wrong and I'm old.
  - cmollis 5y ago
    I switched my major from 'business' (yawn) to comp sci 35 years ago (1986).. at my school, it was previously a 'concentration' in the Math department, which meant you got a BS in Math, concentration in Computer Science. It wasn't a full Bachelors of Science degree until about two years before I got there.
  - chrisweekly 5y ago
    My father (RIP) got his Masters degree in CS-EE from MIT in 1972, almost 50 years ago.
  - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
    I think you are kidding. Even my southern noname university had cs degrees 40 years ago. We had 3, one that was computer engineering, one in arts & sciences, one in the biz college
- sanderjd 5y ago
  They probably meant they went to college for something like computer science or computer engineering that includes a ton of classes that involve a lot of programming?
  - hsitz 5y ago
    Or, since he says "pre-teen", it could just be that his parents sent him to a programming class at a local community college when he was twelve years old. That's the sense I get, actually. The number of people who start actual college as a pre-teen is vanishingly small.
- analog31 5y ago
  My mom taught programming at the college level in the early 80s, in a computer science department at a state university. At that time, the big universities had computer science departments. The 4 year colleges were more of a hodgepodge, ranging from full blown CS, to a handful of programming courses offered by the math department. By the time I graduated in the mid 80s, CS departments were pretty widespread.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  Depending on what is meant by 'programming,' computer science really grew out of mathematics and occasionally physics departments at colleges in the late 50s and early 60s. Disciplines started establishing CS departments in the US around the mid- to late- 60s. I'd say anyone exposed to that period on could be considered as having formal training in "programming" in a college or university environment. I have a good friend that worked during the 60s era programming with punch cards doing applied physics work in FORTRAN (pre 77) which was already pretty big by then. You could probably go back a bit further but I don't think much was being actively taught as a sort of course one might expect today then. So I'd say you could have at most 65ish years of programming since formal use in college. No, it was not software engineering at the time per se but I'd absolutely call it programming.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Electrical Engineering departments were also starting to offer more and more "programming and computer" related courses as well. At a lot of universities these eventually branched out to become Computer or Software Engineering programs.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    My uncle worked at the National Institutes of Health for about 35 years doing bioinformatics and protein structure modeling. In FORTRAN. Always in FORTRAN. He knew other stuff, but the bulk of his work was always FORTRAN.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      And young people are still learning Fortran today, though it's not the most common language any more, and we tend to learn several different ones.
      - mywittyname 5y ago
        I didn't learn fortran in university, but I did have to learn it for a job. It's still THE language for scientific computing. So in any job in or adjacent to scientific computing, you're bound to run into fortran.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  On my case, you could already get it high school in the mid-80's.
  - bobochan 5y ago
    We had a Pascal class on a VAX in my high school in 1983, and it was fantastic. We used the classic "Oh! Pascal!" text and it was great preparation for college. There was no CS major at the liberal arts school where I ended up, but there were courses with Turbo Pascal taught by the math department before I graduated.
- astura 5y ago
  The first computer science degree offered in the US was in 1962. The first in the world was offered in 1953.
- ajford 5y ago
  I'm still holding onto some of my mom's CompSci homework from the early 80s or so. Mostly based on flow diagrams and what amounts to state machines. Sadly no punch cards, though she talked about taking them in to run assignments. Story goes that she had a campus job cleaning, and made good friends with the guys in charge of running the mainframe by bringing them food and drinks when she stopped by. Which of course meant she could often get them to sneak her stack of cards into the queue overnight. Details are fuzzy since I last heard the tales over a decade ago, and haven't dug the assignments out in forever.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  Someone who entered college at the start of the dot-com bubble is in their mid 40s, and that's not even when CS degrees were first offered, just when they started entering the public consciousness. You could easily have a CS degree and be past normal retirement age.
  - nullserver 5y ago
    CS College degrees in dot com era were hit and miss. Also often had a weird mix of electrical engineering courses thrown in. Was quite common to do 2-3 years then drop out and start a job. So much so that people with degrees were often looked down on. Exceptions for things like MIT. After year 3, there was nothing left for me to take. So I took a job. I would like to have a degree, but it was the right call at the time. Few years ago I went back and started an Art degree. Was a blast.
- jleyank 5y ago
  Started on a pdp-8/E in 1973 with its staggering 4k of 12-bit memory. "Going to college to program" might have meant going to where the machines were as most of them were on the large size... We had to descend on the college computer centre, which drove the adults nuts. Rugrats running about, fixing their programs for them. Times were different then, but the graduate-to-hacker test was to start with blank paper and end up with a working program. It was too big and too slow, but at the end the new hacker was enlightened.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Going to college for programming must mean they are quite young indeed. When did colleges even start offering programming degrees? Per Wikipedia, 1953. Coincidentally the same year that RMS—not exactly the youngest programmer around—was born. But that waa a graduate degree. Undergraduate probably sometime between then and 1962 when Purdue opened the first full CS department, I would assume.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
herodoturtle 5y ago
> As someone who first started programming in 1979 I absolutely love that there are seasoned experts like you on HN. Would you mind sharing with us what you're working on these days? Compared to you I'm relatively young (I've been programming around 26 years) and in my circles I don't get to mix with too many older programmers. Would love to hear your thoughts on career trajectories. For me personally, I'm gradually spending less time on pursuing commercial interests, and more time on pro bono projects - and I love the idea of working on open source software indefinitely once I retire. Cheers from South Africa.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Same here, 31 years. I'm 43 and started in around 1989-1990 at age 12. I didn't know anyone who had ever even attempted to program a computer, so I was completely on my own. I have a good grasp now but remain humbled by the craft (coding every day). Nearly everyone I know now is either where I was twenty years ago or insanely elitist. Still on my own. I have many authors to thank.
  - eitland 5y ago
    Another relatively young programmer here: born in 80 started but started programming somewhere between 92 and 94 on Commodore 64. I've been extremely lucky to mostly have worked with mostly ordinary programmers with some extremely good[1] thrown in and luckily even with the brilliant ones all except two of them were also down to earth and nice as well. [1]: "master of all trades", all-knowing teacher types with "saintly" patience, learns-anything-in-two-hours-and-proceeds-to-fix-hard-bugs-after-lunch
- orionblastar 5y ago
  I am 52, I started in BASIC programming in 1979. I am currently disabled and unable to work. I am trying to get better so I can become healthier and get back to work. Programming became a lot easier when Visual BASIC and Delphi came out. Just drag and drop controls. Due to ageism I am sure I don't fit the culture of a startup or relate to 20 somethings. They hire them young anyway not old. So I do tech support for family and friends to get by.
3pt14159 5y ago
Wow, that's an even longer time. I started tinkering with code in the late 80s when I got my first computer at 4, then went to college when I was 11. First job at 14. I feel like 30 years of coding is long enough to feel like a long, long time. My pops had punchcards at home from the good ol' days. I wasn't part of the couple waves of programmers, but I think it is fair to say I was in pretty early. Retying out programs from magazines isn't even something most programmers have considered these days, let alone programming without the internet. But the essence of your comment is right. Of course there would be people out there that have programmed for twice as long as I have. That's a little frightening to think of.
- danaliv 5y ago
  > Retyping out programs from magazines isn't even something most programmers have considered these days Oof, this takes me back to the day I learned about RAM the hard way. I was typing out a program from a magazine. It seemed like it took forever, even then. About halfway through the computer rudely informed me that 4K of RAM is not, in fact, enough for everyone.
  - stevesimmons 5y ago
    Was that a Vic-20? 3583 bytes free, after taking out the 22x23 screen display.
    - danaliv 5y ago
      We have a winner. :)
      - tonyarkles 5y ago
        The memories! POKE 36879! I learned originally on a VIC-20 by typing in games out of books from the public library. At some point we upgraded to an XT and a friend sold me a copy of Power C for $20. It came with a beautiful hard copy library reference and the rest, as they say, is history!
modwest 5y ago
> Time is relative, something that becomes more and more clear, I think, the older a person gets. Yet you’re responding as if you don’t understand time is relative at all.
WalterBright 5y ago
I started programming in 1974 :-)
Jakobeha 5y ago
Also not directed towards you, but just because someone has programmed for a long time doesn't been they're particularly good at it. Plenty of people don't learn - it's not even a character flaw, some people just program for the job.
rikroots 5y ago
I first programmed a calculator (well, copy-keyed a hangman game program into a calculator) back in 1980. Passed my 'O' level computing exam in 1983. Started building websites in the last years of the 20th century. Looking back, none of that feels like "programming" to me. I finally started programming when I had a mind-blowing "A-HA!" moment about what Object Oriented programming was all about in 2009 - which made a change from the many, many "wtf" moments I had with non-Basic-like languages before then.

by hsitz 5y ago

minitoar 5y ago

Going to college for programming must mean they are quite young indeed. When did colleges even start offering programming degrees? Unless maybe this is some sort of vocational college.

musingsole 5y ago
Young is relative... Computer science degrees have been available in colleges for 20+ years
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  20+ is technically correct. NC State was celebrating 40 years of CS in 2006 or so and they weren't the first. CS degrees have been around since the 1960s, so 50+ years at this point of CS as a separate degree program in the US. Apparently Cambridge offered their first CS degree in 1953.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Yes, but they took quite some time to spread to the whole country and to every major university. That didn't really start until the 70s and 80s (in line with when NC State got established).
  - uncletaco 5y ago
    My graduate school's CS department is older than the university it now belongs to.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- arethuza 5y ago
  Manchester University has had a CS department and degree since 1965: https://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/about/history-and-heritage/ https://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/about/history-and-heritage/
- astura 5y ago
  Woah there, I was studying computer science in college 20 years ago and it wasn't even close to a new degree program then.
  - zikzak 5y ago
    Too be fair, when I say 20 years ago I'm thinking "the 80s", then I remember that's wrong and I'm old.
- cmollis 5y ago
  I switched my major from 'business' (yawn) to comp sci 35 years ago (1986).. at my school, it was previously a 'concentration' in the Math department, which meant you got a BS in Math, concentration in Computer Science. It wasn't a full Bachelors of Science degree until about two years before I got there.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  My father (RIP) got his Masters degree in CS-EE from MIT in 1972, almost 50 years ago.
- NotSammyHagar 5y ago
  I think you are kidding. Even my southern noname university had cs degrees 40 years ago. We had 3, one that was computer engineering, one in arts & sciences, one in the biz college
sanderjd 5y ago
They probably meant they went to college for something like computer science or computer engineering that includes a ton of classes that involve a lot of programming?
- hsitz 5y ago
  Or, since he says "pre-teen", it could just be that his parents sent him to a programming class at a local community college when he was twelve years old. That's the sense I get, actually. The number of people who start actual college as a pre-teen is vanishingly small.
analog31 5y ago
My mom taught programming at the college level in the early 80s, in a computer science department at a state university. At that time, the big universities had computer science departments. The 4 year colleges were more of a hodgepodge, ranging from full blown CS, to a handful of programming courses offered by the math department. By the time I graduated in the mid 80s, CS departments were pretty widespread.
Frost1x 5y ago
Depending on what is meant by 'programming,' computer science really grew out of mathematics and occasionally physics departments at colleges in the late 50s and early 60s. Disciplines started establishing CS departments in the US around the mid- to late- 60s. I'd say anyone exposed to that period on could be considered as having formal training in "programming" in a college or university environment. I have a good friend that worked during the 60s era programming with punch cards doing applied physics work in FORTRAN (pre 77) which was already pretty big by then. You could probably go back a bit further but I don't think much was being actively taught as a sort of course one might expect today then. So I'd say you could have at most 65ish years of programming since formal use in college. No, it was not software engineering at the time per se but I'd absolutely call it programming.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Electrical Engineering departments were also starting to offer more and more "programming and computer" related courses as well. At a lot of universities these eventually branched out to become Computer or Software Engineering programs.
- JackFr 5y ago
  My uncle worked at the National Institutes of Health for about 35 years doing bioinformatics and protein structure modeling. In FORTRAN. Always in FORTRAN. He knew other stuff, but the bulk of his work was always FORTRAN.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    And young people are still learning Fortran today, though it's not the most common language any more, and we tend to learn several different ones.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      I didn't learn fortran in university, but I did have to learn it for a job. It's still THE language for scientific computing. So in any job in or adjacent to scientific computing, you're bound to run into fortran.
pjmlp 5y ago
On my case, you could already get it high school in the mid-80's.
- bobochan 5y ago
  We had a Pascal class on a VAX in my high school in 1983, and it was fantastic. We used the classic "Oh! Pascal!" text and it was great preparation for college. There was no CS major at the liberal arts school where I ended up, but there were courses with Turbo Pascal taught by the math department before I graduated.
astura 5y ago
The first computer science degree offered in the US was in 1962. The first in the world was offered in 1953.
ajford 5y ago
I'm still holding onto some of my mom's CompSci homework from the early 80s or so. Mostly based on flow diagrams and what amounts to state machines. Sadly no punch cards, though she talked about taking them in to run assignments. Story goes that she had a campus job cleaning, and made good friends with the guys in charge of running the mainframe by bringing them food and drinks when she stopped by. Which of course meant she could often get them to sneak her stack of cards into the queue overnight. Details are fuzzy since I last heard the tales over a decade ago, and haven't dug the assignments out in forever.
TheCoelacanth 5y ago
Someone who entered college at the start of the dot-com bubble is in their mid 40s, and that's not even when CS degrees were first offered, just when they started entering the public consciousness. You could easily have a CS degree and be past normal retirement age.
- nullserver 5y ago
  CS College degrees in dot com era were hit and miss. Also often had a weird mix of electrical engineering courses thrown in. Was quite common to do 2-3 years then drop out and start a job. So much so that people with degrees were often looked down on. Exceptions for things like MIT. After year 3, there was nothing left for me to take. So I took a job. I would like to have a degree, but it was the right call at the time. Few years ago I went back and started an Art degree. Was a blast.
jleyank 5y ago
Started on a pdp-8/E in 1973 with its staggering 4k of 12-bit memory. "Going to college to program" might have meant going to where the machines were as most of them were on the large size... We had to descend on the college computer centre, which drove the adults nuts. Rugrats running about, fixing their programs for them. Times were different then, but the graduate-to-hacker test was to start with blank paper and end up with a working program. It was too big and too slow, but at the end the new hacker was enlightened.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Going to college for programming must mean they are quite young indeed. When did colleges even start offering programming degrees? Per Wikipedia, 1953. Coincidentally the same year that RMS—not exactly the youngest programmer around—was born. But that waa a graduate degree. Undergraduate probably sometime between then and 1962 when Purdue opened the first full CS department, I would assume.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

herodoturtle 5y ago

> As someone who first started programming in 1979 I absolutely love that there are seasoned experts like you on HN. Would you mind sharing with us what you're working on these days? Compared to you I'm relatively young (I've been programming around 26 years) and in my circles I don't get to mix with too many older programmers. Would love to hear your thoughts on career trajectories. For me personally, I'm gradually spending less time on pursuing commercial interests, and more time on pro bono projects - and I love the idea of working on open source software indefinitely once I retire. Cheers from South Africa.

datavirtue 5y ago
Same here, 31 years. I'm 43 and started in around 1989-1990 at age 12. I didn't know anyone who had ever even attempted to program a computer, so I was completely on my own. I have a good grasp now but remain humbled by the craft (coding every day). Nearly everyone I know now is either where I was twenty years ago or insanely elitist. Still on my own. I have many authors to thank.
- eitland 5y ago
  Another relatively young programmer here: born in 80 started but started programming somewhere between 92 and 94 on Commodore 64. I've been extremely lucky to mostly have worked with mostly ordinary programmers with some extremely good[1] thrown in and luckily even with the brilliant ones all except two of them were also down to earth and nice as well. [1]: "master of all trades", all-knowing teacher types with "saintly" patience, learns-anything-in-two-hours-and-proceeds-to-fix-hard-bugs-after-lunch
orionblastar 5y ago
I am 52, I started in BASIC programming in 1979. I am currently disabled and unable to work. I am trying to get better so I can become healthier and get back to work. Programming became a lot easier when Visual BASIC and Delphi came out. Just drag and drop controls. Due to ageism I am sure I don't fit the culture of a startup or relate to 20 somethings. They hire them young anyway not old. So I do tech support for family and friends to get by.

3pt14159 5y ago

Wow, that's an even longer time. I started tinkering with code in the late 80s when I got my first computer at 4, then went to college when I was 11. First job at 14. I feel like 30 years of coding is long enough to feel like a long, long time. My pops had punchcards at home from the good ol' days. I wasn't part of the couple waves of programmers, but I think it is fair to say I was in pretty early. Retying out programs from magazines isn't even something most programmers have considered these days, let alone programming without the internet. But the essence of your comment is right. Of course there would be people out there that have programmed for twice as long as I have. That's a little frightening to think of.

danaliv 5y ago
> Retyping out programs from magazines isn't even something most programmers have considered these days Oof, this takes me back to the day I learned about RAM the hard way. I was typing out a program from a magazine. It seemed like it took forever, even then. About halfway through the computer rudely informed me that 4K of RAM is not, in fact, enough for everyone.
- stevesimmons 5y ago
  Was that a Vic-20? 3583 bytes free, after taking out the 22x23 screen display.
  - danaliv 5y ago
    We have a winner. :)
    - tonyarkles 5y ago
      The memories! POKE 36879! I learned originally on a VIC-20 by typing in games out of books from the public library. At some point we upgraded to an XT and a friend sold me a copy of Power C for $20. It came with a beautiful hard copy library reference and the rest, as they say, is history!

modwest 5y ago

> Time is relative, something that becomes more and more clear, I think, the older a person gets. Yet you’re responding as if you don’t understand time is relative at all.

WalterBright 5y ago

I started programming in 1974 :-)

Jakobeha 5y ago

Also not directed towards you, but just because someone has programmed for a long time doesn't been they're particularly good at it. Plenty of people don't learn - it's not even a character flaw, some people just program for the job.

rikroots 5y ago

I first programmed a calculator (well, copy-keyed a hangman game program into a calculator) back in 1980. Passed my 'O' level computing exam in 1983. Started building websites in the last years of the 20th century. Looking back, none of that feels like "programming" to me. I finally started programming when I had a mind-blowing "A-HA!" moment about what Object Oriented programming was all about in 2009 - which made a change from the many, many "wtf" moments I had with non-Basic-like languages before then.