Unscientific Nerdchild Survey

[snarp]

If you learned a programming/scripting language at age 13 or younger:

1) Did you start trying to code before or after you started algebra in school?

2) Which seemed easier for you?

Comments

[vass]

Depends how you define algebra. Seventh grade we started learning what was called algebra, but which I think by US standards is probably pre-algebra? Like, a + 7 = 10, a = ? . Or 6x = 36, x = ? That level. And that was the same year I moved to a snooty school where they had a one laptop per student program, and we all learned Logo. This was 1993. The laptops were 386 Compaqs with a tiny hard drive (if you were lucky - about half the students had the older model Toshibas which booted from floppy) running DOS 5. There was no internet access at school or at anyone's home.

They dovetailed very nicely. I didn't find either one difficult at that point. There was a three day unit where we got to play with Lego-Logo, and I wanted it to last forever.

The next year the maths got harder and I started digging into Basic on my own time, hampered by the fact that I had no idea what I was doing and didn't know anyone else who did know, and desperately wanted threading without knowing that that was the name of the thing that I wanted. or that neither Basic or Logo had that. Sometimes I stared at binary files, trying to find patterns in the ascii because I thought that was what real source code looked like.

When they started getting hard it was in different ways: programming because I had no good resources at all and no mentors; maths because my working memory sucks rocks through a straw, my handwriting is impossible, and also I was a paranoid little shit who thought our teachers' introduction of the number line was an attempt at thought control.