Learning to program

I was talking with some co-workers yesterday during a break when the topic of children and programming came up. More specifically, how to get children started programming. That led me to thinking about how I first got started and the progression from that first step to where I am today. As best I can tell, the following list pretty much sums it up:

  1. Basic on Apple IIe (circa 1990, self-taught)
  2. Visual Basic 3.0 on Windows 3.1 (1993, self-taught)
  3. Visual Basic 4.0 on Windows 95 (1995, self-taught)
  4. Pascal on VAX (1996, college)
  5. HTML 2.0 (1996, self-taught)
  6. Assembly on VAX (1997, college)
  7. C on Unix (1997, college)
  8. Java on Windows 95 (1997, self-taught)
  9. C++ on Windows 95 (1998, college)
  10. Delphi on Windows 95 (1998, self-taught)
  11. Smalltalk on Windows 95 (1998, college)
  12. Prolog on Windows 95 (1998, college)
  13. ML on Windows 95 (1998, college)
  14. HTML 3.2 (1999, self-taught)
  15. CSS pre-1.0 (1999, self-taught)
  16. JavaScript 1.0 (1999, self-taught)
  17. HTML 4.0 (2000, self-taught)
  18. CSS 1.0 (2000, self-taught)
  19. JavaScript 1.3 (2000, self-taught)
  20. XML 1.0 (2000, self-taught)
  21. JSP (2000, self-taught)
  22. XSLT 1.0 (2001, self-taught)
  23. SVG 1.0 (2002, self-taught)
  24. PHP 4 (2003, self-taught)
  25. VB.NET (2005, self-taught)
  26. C# (2005, self-taught)

I’m sure I’m missing a few steps the list, but I think this just about covers it. It’s certainly a long way from Basic on the Apple IIe to C#. Clearly, this would not be the ideal path for someone who wants to learn programming from scratch.

How did you learn programming?

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