Kind of merged with Sinclair BASIC to form a gestalt consciousness at the age of 4 when my dad got me to type in a load of listings for games he'd written. His bedroom coder business never really took off, but I was raised on that at the same time as learning to write rudimentary sentences in english and add up. Therefore, that sonofabitch has ruined me for "real programming" probably forever.
But I can write you a mean 16k chess-like strategy battle game.
Dabbled in FaST BASIC and STOS on my Atari ST, but never really got anywhere (it had so many much better, easily loaded programs available vs the Speccy). Got a second wind with QBasic then GWBasic (yes, in that order :-/) on the PC, which was a little easier and more powerful. One I basically made Gorillas and Snake mods with, and wrote a load of chaotic not-very-good demos and timewaster textmode games.
The other, I got 95% through producing a working, playable, Hercules Mono Text Mode version of Space Invaders - I had the ship, the shields, bullets, sound effects... and a single alien. Killable, at least. The only remaining steps were to make a whole wave of them (fairly easily implemented with an array) and the boss ship. The slowdown effect would happen naturally, as it was BASIC on a 12mhz 286. Then I got the good idea to try and upgrade that computer from DOS 5 to DOS 6.22 ... without backing up first. Bye bye, GW Basic. Whoops.
Also through the DOS/Win3.1/95 days I was a mean hand with a batch file. Basically had the entire boot process running off a fairly sophisticated, hierarchical menu system, with multiple and automatic startup file changes and reboots for playing certain overly-demanding games.
Since then not done much. There hasn't really been much point other than hobbyist tinkering - stuff like Scratch or TinyBasic. Maybe when I run up against a problem that no-one else has yet made an app for, I'll figure out something a bit more modern and useful (Perl would be good, so I can fix Get_iPlayer properly), but until then there's better things to waste time on, like this.
(BTW would stuff like SEUCK/3DCK count?)
edit: oh, and seeing the above post, I can do a little bit of HTML (upto frames and very simple PHP-MySQL level, but not CSS & the like) and some MS Access databasing, but I never really considered that stuff so much as programming, more like an advanced form of word processing / spreadsheeting...
) and editing HTML since 8th grade...have become quite familiar with VB on my own since then, though it isn't particularly useful in many cases. Dabbled in C++, a bit of PASCAL, have some familiarity with assembly functions, did a short course in Java which was quite useful, starting to get somewhat adept in JavaScript (made some websites in a multimedia course and recently been working on my own for a business that uses a little JS here and there). Even played with a few batch files in the past, though mostly just to annoy the IT department back at high school, most notably by spamming 'Never Gonna Give You Up' lyrics to every computer using netsend on final day (never got caught, started on a timer and I was in a different building to the source once it started). I certainly don't program every day, but when the need arises I can usually hammer something out to do the job.
