How long have u been a programmer?

I don't know if this was around before but I was curious and wondered:

How many years have you been slinging code, profesionally speaking?

4.5 years for me.

Been getting paid for code for 1.5 months, but I wouldn't say I'm a programmer. I'm a misplaced engineering student who had computer skills on his resume from messing around

Professionally, been coding for 4 years... however, I have been programming since I was 7, which makes it about 20 years.

Since the Apple ][ C myself...

Tough question to answer, to be honest. Been doing it for ages, though I'd only classify my programming as 'professional quality' for the last three years or so. It was then that I decided I really liked it and wanted to make programming a part of my career.

First program I ever wrote was my own, unprompted and unguided QBASIC program that played the high/low game using a hardcoded number when I was 10 or 11 (used the built in reference that came with QBASIC on DOS 5 .. those of you that remember that horrible document, tremble now) which is a decade gone. Tinkered with JavaScript and HTML starting at about 14, tried to clone an old BBS door game called Usurper using 'C' at around age 17 or so (didn't get very far), and first plopped down a perl script at age 19. Learned Perl, my first "serious" language about 1.5 years ago. Actually grokked Perl about 7-8 months ago and still learning the deeper portions of the language. Since my foray into Perl, I've used PHP, Java, C/C++, VB 6, JavaScript, HTML, XML/XSLT/XPATH/ETC., WML, and BASIC in one capacity or another. I've also examined, but never used: Pascal, Cold Fusion, ASP.NET, Python, Ruby, Lua, XUL, and x86 Assembly. Of all that crap, I'd feel comfortable writing in PHP, JavaScript, and HTML only (Java and VB 6 I could muddle through with a very thick reference because I'm familiar with Java and VB 6 isn't hard, it just has annoying quirks). I'm currently paid to write in Perl, HTML, and JavaScript.

What does all this mean? Why... I'm not a programmer yet, of course.

Still aspiring.

I guess I was 12 or 13 when I first started to fiddle with GWBasic, then later on in my teens I fiddled some more with Visual Basic - and neither really got me going.. in fact it wasn't until I was 19 that I first played with C, and that's what did it for me.

Having spent almost the entire second semester of my first year in the robotics lab, I knew what I wanted to do as a graduate.. it took 4 hard years of study and quite a heavy conversion to roll over from an Aerospace degree to a Sofware career, but it was worth it.. now aged 26, I'm still learning and still loving it. I know it wouldn't be the same if I had stayed in engineering... sad, but true.


christo

My first programming was probably around age 14 on my TI-82. Wrote a little thing in chemistry class to convert quantities of a substance (everyone remember that atoms-moles-grams junk?). It even showed your work so you could write that down on the paper, too.

I kept writing for the 82 and eventually the 85. I had an enormous graphical yahtzee on the 85 that I was really proud of. Everything still in TI-BASIC, though. It wasn't until college that I had anything "real".

College started four years ago, and it was C into C++. Through school, did some bash shell, java sockets, VB, VAX Assembly (dear god), and even C# and .NET.

Co-managing a BBS in Perl made me learn it starting about three years ago. I have used regex, Tk, CGI, DBI, and a ton of little modules with it. It wasn't really until a year or so ago that I really dove into Perl and learned it. Now I know it better than anything else and love to use it.
[/life story]

My master programs on the TI were six or seven years ago. Real languages for the last four. And I'm yet to be paid to do it. I'll mark myself down for tier-2.

Next year will be my 20th aniversary.

In 5th grade, 1984, I went to a private school and was introduced to my first computer. Loved it emediately. That Christmas, I used my money I saved all year, plus my Christmas money to pay for half of a TRS-80 model 3. (My mom paid the other half) I was glued to the keyboard for the next 2 years after that. (until I upgraded to an Atari 800)

I wrote my first game in 1985, age 11. It was pretty simple, an alien ship (circle) flashed around the screen on the left side, I was a space ship (an oval) on the right side. When I hit the fire button, a laser (yellow line) shot from my ship to the left. If it hit the alien, I scored a point. That was back in the day when, if you bought a joystick, it came with a book showing what memory addresses to peek to read the controls. hehe

I can hardly remember my life before computers. I kind of wish I was introduced to them at an earlier age. But then again, the computers before '84 weren't so easy to use, or so cheap. I've never used an Apple II. My first Apple was a Mac 512k.

I am more of Systems admin than a coder. I use Bash/Shell programing a lot, but I also mess around with PERL, C, PHP, and some VB 6 on the side. I have to know enough PERL and PHP to help out in coding apps and debugging systems once in a while. Only class I ever took was one over VB 6 because we had to take some computer class in college and the general "How to use Office" was deemed uncessary since I was a beta tester for Office products at the time. (I had XP beta three months before the college's tech god did) so I took intro to VB instead.

So I wouldn't call myself a programmer by trade, but I started with GWBASIC in Dos 3.2 or 3.3, I can't remember which when I was about 6 or seven writing simple programs that would print my name across the screen back and forth and print it out on the old dot matrix printer.