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?