Ask HN: How many of you HNers learned to program for the first time in college?

It doesn’t matter when you first learn because once you start, if you like it, you’ll never stop.<p>I learned to program BASIC in 3rd grade and C in 7th grade. Then FORTRAN and PASCAL in college (Mechanical Engineering). Then C++, Lisp and C# at my first job. Then PHP and SQL, and later Python. Somewhere in there I learned assembler for x86 and some microcontrollers. I learned Java just so I could teach it as a volunteer APCS teacher.<p>Just start; that’s the key.

My first year University course advisor suggested I do the brand new Pascal programming course in ‘79.<p>They enrolled a couple of hundred students but only had 5 card punch machines and one reader. One month of 24&#x2F;7 programming by trial and error, which the lecturers wanted to avoid, only two machines survived, one had a broken ‘b’ key.<p>This set me up for future success as future 1980’s employers always got the young bloke to run the computer.

Not me: I learned (FORTRAN, BASIC, Z80&#x2F;6502 ASM) at home while still at school (70s&#x2F;80s).

I practice, yes. Real learning came when need to do something real came up. &#x27;You, summer student, Do this for 2k rows.&#x27;