I started by modding PHPBB the forum software and just kept tinkering with other web scripts until I made my own :)

One day i might try some basic desktop apps.

I began my interest in coding in the 1980s when I was a wee nipper and we had such beasts as the BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum :-)
Got myself some C coding qualifications in 1992 and then went to work on the railway...

I started back in the times of the c64 with coding, first BASIC then Assember. Later on PC I learned C/C++ and little bit of Delphi. Today I work as developer using mostly C# for desktop applications and PHP/JS for web projects...

I began about 20 years ago with Quick Basic (MS Dos) and programmed a simple benchmark and other stuff. A Scientist teached me basic. Later I learned by myself with a book PHP (about 10 years ago). But I am still not a professional programmer, I only do programming sometimes when needed or just for fun.

I am trying to do science. And as science is about working with data, learning some data manipulation tools is a must for healthy mind. So I learned R, which is great for statistical stuff as well and can make nice images (few years ago I discovered Knitr, with which you can integrate R code with LaTeX and make even better documents!). But R is not all that great for text processing, so I learned Python for that and as a more general programming language.

Recently, I had to learn Java for Agent Based Model (I was told to use one framework, still don't know why, it is not helping with what I am doing that much if at all) and I learned C++ as R is nice, but slow for many tasks, but C++ can be relatively easily called from R or Python when speed is required (and modern development of R is pretty much in wrappers around high-performing C++ code).

Bash is awesome as well and a must as a lot of work is pipeline, preprocess data for program, run them through program and then postprocess output of said program. GNU tools like sed, grep, tr or cut are so highly optimized that even changes in huge files takes only a few second in comparison to similar problems in R/Python.

My father showed me Turbo Pascal 5.0 long time ago. On a Commodore PC-10 with an 8088 processor and MS-DOS 3.3. Wow, that's so long ago. But my fascination about computers just started. Playing games on them was only one aspect, but a big one of course ;)

At grammar school I've heard about C the first time, and thought, eugh... the code looks ugly. And from what I've seen, it was nevertheless quite similar to Turbo Pascal. I preferred writing BEGIN and END instead of curly braces though. But that changed over time, writing curly braces is much faster ;) Nowadays C is still big in business, Turbo Pascal evolved to Delphi, but personally I don't know anybody using it. And as I've also switched to C, it doesn't matter to me anymore.

Today I still program C and also a bit of C++ or java sometimes, but also Python and PHP. I've realized that programming languages have their special features to simplify things, but in general, it's just a tool to get your program to become true. The programming language doesn't really matter.
I still love programming, especially with the tools available nowadays. I love git, I love my editor Sublime Text and I love programming on Linux.

I probably started around 2010 when I was still in high school (Yes, I'm a baby) and started tinkering with HTML, I made some web pages, but never really did much with it. My first real programming language was Python, and that was a lot of fun :) Over the next few years I'd dig into How To Think Like A Computer Scientist (Python edition), get stuck, and come back to get a bit farther.

I'd later learn the basics of of C++ in college, though I didn't stick around long. Now in the present as I look into game development (something I've toyed with since I was a kid) I'm learning C# for working in Unity :)

Quoting: tuubiCopying C-64 basic snippets from borrowed copies of a magazine.

Same here. Though with no tutorials, and no knowledge of the English language back then, the most sophisticated things I ever did were things like modifying existing programs to produce some other kind of behavior. Like changing the data section of a program to play the tune I'd code in to play, while flashing the screen in different colors, etc.

I came back into 'programming' (yeah, in scare quotes) years later with shell scripting and awk. Somewhat encouraged by a tiny bit of proficiency at the shell I then worked through Jim Butterfield's marvelous book on 6502 assembly -- to finally figure out machine code that was such a mystery to me as a kid. Nowadays I'm trying to get good at C, merely as a hobby. Though proficiency with different kinds of algorithms on different kinds of data structure is something 'obliquely' related to stuff I'm supposed to be studying in a professional capacity (logic, philosophy).

By the way, learning awk is totally worth the effort, for anyone working in any capacity with text on a computer. Awk + sed + good grasp of regular expressions = productivity.

I used to read those Usbourne BASIC books in school. Never had a micro to program though, only had access to 386+ or those old Acorn machines - none of which I was aware you could actually program. I must have been around 10 at the time.

Later on in the teenage years I got a 486 given to me and started to experiment with the available tools, mainly qbasic, but I was also just starting to get the *idea* of programming languages and that there was more than one. But! My mother used to beat me for spending too much time on the computer and sooooo I turned in to a rebellious shithead instead of learning (there's also more to it than that, but that's the essence. Interests weren't supported).

I rediscovered computers towards the end of my teens and found some like minded friends. That cumulated in an adhoc game dev team using the Torque Game Engine (Tribes 1 engine). But then I went through a messy breakup and due to the cost of living ended up becoming a welder/fitter and not really doing much with computers.

Fast forward a decade (well, 7 years), I've gotten *out* of trouble, found a legendary girlfriend, quit work, and dived in to university to become a software engineer, coming up final year now. Programming was always what I wanted to do, now I'm doing it. It's been a heck of a ride.

I have the occasional pang of regret that I lost a possible 15! years of programming experience.

Quotefound a legendary girlfriend

Does that mean that she is unique? Do they respawn? Or are they even instanced for each player?

How was the bossfight?