How did YOU learn to program?

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Jun 12 2013, 3:13 am
Read the DM guide til' I got sick of it, and could remember most of it out of head. Mostly self-taught though, it's a pretty logical setup DM has.
Jun 13 2013, 12:33 pm
Tutorials on BYOND. I think learning BYOND programming language would've been a lot simpler for others by learning other languages(C++, C#, Python,etc.)
Jun 13 2013, 10:04 pm
Bwicki was a big source of programming back in the day.
Jun 23 2013, 6:27 am
I ended up on BYOND for the first 5ish years of my programming career, so I was limited to what BYOND had for resources. Since google proved mostly fruitless here, I used Zilals beginner tutorial for RPGs, and I went from there. Any time I needed to do something I'd check f1, if I couldn't figure it out from there, I went to the developer forums and asked for help. Eventually Chatters/other chats became a thing for me, and I became more well acquainted with helpful developers, so that helped.
Jun 29 2013, 8:07 am
In response to Magicsofa
Magicsofa wrote:
The thing I was talking about was actually called "Learn to program BASIC" and it was published by Interplay. It was a sort of interactive tutorial program on a CD, with videos of this character called "media man" who taught you, well, the basics :D

I found some videos from it on youtube and they are pretty hilarious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSOtdF-mDh0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6jYr7eDad4

It was really geared toward introducing people to programming, not actually getting them to be decent at it. Of course it's also directed at young kids, so that is probably why it wasn't very advanced :P

It's funny that you brought that up- that's actually sort of where I started, in a way. A friend that I played Doom with (also a BYOND'er at one point) was one of the pro-users of LTPB and a member of the more advanced community that formed around it. He did a lot of things in it, but he was getting tired of some of its limitations that didn't make much sense given modern (2003-ish) CPUs. We went on a massive hunt to get this program "revived", so to speak, and managed to obtain a copy of the source code from one of the old Interplay developers. It was written entirely in C, and had a couple of different projects. It completely blew my mind.

I had no clue what I was doing, so I walked away from that with my metaphorical tail between my not-so-metaphorical legs and played around with VB for a bit, then the same guy that introduced me to LTPB introduced me to BYOND (ARWG by Malver, specifically, then MLaaS). Wanting to remake MLaaS, I picked up DM and sucked badly at it but moved on pretty quickly to C++ to balance that out.
Jul 2 2013, 11:53 am (Edited on Apr 4 2015, 12:44 am)
And lo, the digitalmouse, upon coming of age - and survived cooties - at year 9, wrote his first "what is your name?" program in BASIC on a Honeywell mainframe/network in Atlanta in the year of our lord 1976. And saw that it was good.

Four years later, he spawned an incomplete text-only/console Star Trek clone dubbed "starwreck". And saw that it also was good, although still written in BASIC.

Later on, he scribbled a communications routine in about 100 bytes of Z80 machine language/op-code to allow two Sinclair ZX80's to talk to each other using only their cassette interface ports. This was meant to be the basis for a computer-to-computer Battleship game, but the digitalmouse discovered girls and motorcycles and all was lost in the great hormonal apocalypse of 1981.

There had been rumors of "the second coming of the digitalmouse" with sacred texts of C, Pascal, Fortran, and Forth, along with the "third coming", "fourth coming", and "sometime soon coming" only to have him be re-discovered in 2007 in an Ultimate Frisbee team by some cute Danish women in dire need of a better teacher at a local tech college. They appealed to a higher power, and lo, the messiah was reborn as an educator in HTML, CSS, PHP/Perl and MySQL. To this day you can still here the echos of "no! no! no! do not foresake the DOM, and embrace indentation for cleaner, healthier, code!!" in the dark halls between semesters...

Jul 9 2013, 7:33 am
In response to digitalmouse
digitalmouse wrote:
And lo, the digitalmouse, upon coming of age - and survived cooties - at year 9, wrote his first "what is your name?" program in BASIC on a Honeywell mainframe/network in Atlanta in the year of our lord 1976. And saw that it was good.

Four years later, he spawned an incomplete StarTrek clone dubbed "starwreck". And saw that it also was good, although still written in BASIC.

Later on, he scribbled a communications routine in about 100 bytes of Z80 machine language/op-code to allow two Sinclair ZX80's to talk to each other using only their cassette interface ports. This was meant to be the basis for a computer-to-computer Battleship game, but the digitalmouse discovered girls and motorcycles and all was lost in the great hormonal apocalypse of 1981.

There had been rumors of "the second coming of the digitalmouse" with sacred texts of C, Pascal, Fortran, and Forth, along with the "third coming", "fourth coming", and "sometime soon coming" only to have him be re-discovered in an Ultimate Frisbee team by some cute Danish women in dire need of a better teacher at a local tech college. They appealed to a higher power, and lo, the messiah was reborn as an educator in HTML, CSS, PHP/Perl and MySQL. To this day you can still here the echos of "no! no! no! do not foresake the DOM, and embrace indentation for cleaner, healthier, code!!" in the dark halls between semesters...

This is my gospel now.
Jul 28 2013, 10:40 am
I opened Dream Maker and procceeded to beat at the side of my monitor with a wrench until things started appearing correctly.


Actually it was just a long reading of the DM Guide, along with Zial's demonstrations. Then long, and agonizing trial and error and at one time whipping my keyboard across the room even.
Sep 7 2013, 12:55 pm
I got into DM during 6th grade, roughly 7 years ago. I learned through a lot of trial and error, and also asking questions. Jon helped me a lot, as did Dan during my rather recent work period alongside him on Naruto GOA.

As of current, I'm working on an original, zombie-based action game, and also trying to learn HTML (which I pretty much already know enough to make use of), CSS, and JavaScript through books (though, if anyone has a better way to learn said languages, feel free to let me know -- I don't favor books).
Sep 20 2013, 6:38 pm
I saw a public access TV show from a school nearby about BASIC programming and I was in awe, had no idea you could tell a computer to do complicated things.

At one point the instructor had said 'go to such and such directory and type in this to bring up the compiler' so I went and tried whatever he'd said and it worked. DOS came with QBASIC, who knew?

It had some sample code and really good documentation, too. The first thing I did was play snake. The second thing I did was spend hours trying to figure out how to change it to cheat so I wouldn't die.

I've been unable to deal with or cure my programming problem ever since.
Sep 22 2013, 4:51 pm
I was talking to one of my best friends about making a game one day. A couple of months later, I decided to work towards going into the game development career. After looking up game creation tools, I was lead into two things: Game Programming and BYOND. I bookmarked the BYOND link and went further into the game programming area, taking several youtube tutorials on C++ and DM and getting into a class for programming. Soon after, I kept reading online resources and reading books at the book store and library about programming, and here I am today!
Dec 21 2013, 7:18 am
Started playing around with the idea of game development when I was probably around 10, after playing a flash-based RPG game with crude graphics but a really nice gameplay system (I liked it anyway, but I can't for the life of me remember the name of the game. Only remember being very blocky graphics with spiked hair in a pokemon-esque battle layout). Played around in flash, but never ended up delving into the programming aspect of it.

Started actually programming in java, with private Runescape servers. It was fun for the time being, but as I lost interest in the game, I stopped programming entirely for years afterwards, still playing around with game development in programs like RPG maker.

Next time I started up in programming again in Visual Basic 6E, making small programs to help myself with school and things. This was just before I found byond, introduced by one of my friends at the beginning of highschool because they played an old harry potter game on here, and wanted to make their own game.

Ended up taking two highschool classes on programming (one in VB6, which I ended up goofing off in as it was very basic (no pun intended) stuff, and one in flash because the teacher was new to the course, but it did help learn a few interesting things.)

On here, it was various tutorials, the DM guide and reference random playing around with dream maker, some demos and ripped sources, a lot of community help, and bashing my head on a wall for hours to come up with a solution to a problem. That last part more than most of them.

Still haven't actually completed the first project I started in byond, but I've redone it over 5 times now. Will eventually get it to my liking. :/
Jan 1 2014, 7:08 am
I had a friend at school who showed me the website because he made his own game and at the time I thought it was amazing, after that we used to compete against each other to make games that were better than the other.

Never really bothered with the community because we thought it was just a bunch of kids who watched too much anime, but ten years later I'm still here and I'm finally making a game. (':
Mar 21 2014, 3:49 am
I had been doing windows batch scripts for years (I messed around with Basic, very seldom), then I got into linux, and started scripting with bash shell, then progressed into Python (very shortly), then C++ which I stuck with for about 3 months before trying out C#, VB, Perl, more Python, etc.

Right now my major languages are C++ & C#, bash scripting of course, with python and perl mixed in when needed. All this really kicked off in the last year, before that I knew next to nothing about programming in general.

I basically learned everything I know, from researching on Google, and trial and error. C# was incredibly easy for me to learn after learning C++. And C++ was easier after shell scripts (I had tried C++ before that, and was overwhelmed by it and gave up). I tried Basic and VB again, and soon realized it was **** compared to C++ or even C#.

So yeah, that's basically my story.
Aug 25 2014, 6:18 am
F1 = Reference, best resource in the world.
Aug 28 2014, 2:45 pm (Edited on Aug 28 2014, 2:51 pm)
i learned from my older brother Shammahg & NNG Rips then i started trying to make original games and everytime i would try id fail , and then wthen next game it would progress from the last alittle then i started skimming through DM guide to help and i started when i was about 9 & im 14 now , i had another key before this one and i am currently learning C++ , Html , Java because my brother has decided to give me a hand in other languages because he majors in computer science at florida tech.

i went from programming like this and only being able to do this.
obj/Lubed
   Bambii
      icon = 'Lubed.dmi'
      layer = 10000000000000


to programming like this
Lubed
   Bambii
      parent_type = /obj
      icon = 'File/Lubed.dmi'
      layer = MOB_LAYER + 1;is_Active = null
      Call_AI()..()
   proc
      Call_AI()
         while (src.is_Active == null)
            animate(src,transform = matrix () *2)
         spawn (20) return
Sep 6 2014, 1:08 pm
I learned from the hermit of the 6th paths
Sep 12 2014, 3:30 pm
In response to Hebrons
Writing confusing code doesn't make your code admirable. Wow.


And as for me, I learned here on BYOND back in around 2005. I've been on and off, and done a bit freelance work here. In recent years I've decided to dabble into C++. Three years ago I started a small roguelike in C++ which remains one of my most ambitious projects to date. ( https://github.com/Doohl/Origin )

Nowadays I just code whatever I want, with some freelancing here and there ;)
Sep 13 2014, 2:54 pm (Edited on Sep 14 2014, 1:37 am)
Around 5 years ago I learned HTML (not to say I wasn't making games prior to having done so).

I started looking at sources and messing with them around three years ago. Then, in 2012, I started reading the DM guide whilst on a two week holiday to Tobago. I became confused but subconsciously apprehended what I was reading.

As soon as I arrived at my house after coming back from holiday, I started making games that even now I can't tackle. With this, I became a better programmer. Still, I wanted to progress faster, and so I started lurking around the developers' resources. After practicing daily for a while, I got the hang on BYOND and here I am.

EDIT: I also looked at this angelfire tutorial multiple times and watched tutorials on YouTube by a guy named MrCutlery.
Sep 13 2014, 4:37 pm
In response to Kboy33
Kboy33 wrote:
Around 5 years ago I learned HTML

I learned HTML

HTML

HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML

SILENCE, HEATHEN. HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN THAT MENTIONING HTML IN A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE DISCUSSION IS GENERALLY FROWNED UPON?
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