The infant daughter of a Sydney-based web developer has just made headlines for her predilection for HTML coding. While most toddlers stick to picture books, 17-month old Mia prefers HTML tags on her iPad: she can even identify the tags she has seen on her mother’s computer screen. Mia is obviously a special case, but it’s not that uncommon for people in the dev community to begin coding at an early age. Were you a prodigy too?
For her first birthday, Mia was given HTML For Babies as a joke-gift because of how much her mum liked to code. Surprisingly, the toddler ended up preferring the book to her Snow White and Cinderella picture books.
“She’s not a genius or anything; she’s just exposed to [code] a lot more,” Nyo explained in an interview with Business Insider Australia. “She likes to look at what I’m doing and is very interested in websites, because they are always on my screen, but she can’t speak yet, so I can’t ask her how much she understands.
“She always picks HTML For Babies. It’s got img, p and span tags in colourful and different fonts, and she likes pointing at them. Sometimes I sing to her [from the book]: ‘Img is for image tags. Bold is to make something look strong.’”
Mia is also a proficient iPad user and has mastered the ability to swipe and tap.
When did you first start dabbling in coding? And what did you cut your teeth/gums on? Share your story in the comments section below.
Comments
17 responses to “How Old Were You When You First Learned How To Code?”
I was 9 years old when I first learned
Haha, same here! I was 9 when a dedicated teacher (Mr McGee funily enough, if you’re reading this sir) realised I wasn’t achieving at school because I was bored and started teaching me HTML (at the time nothing like it is now) in his own and my own lunch breaks and after school. Changed my life forever.
*raises a beer for all the teachers who don’t just view it as a dayjob they don’t get paid enough for*
Very basic scripts I’d say early primary school?
I was always fiddling with .BAT files and such, and very quickly started learning about how functions worked in Berkley Logo (followed up by Klik & Play and Microworlds where I had fun making some basic games).
After that I mostly played with Flash during high school, before Java and C++ at uni.
Hahah Klik & Play was so awesome! I could never afford it, and it at the time was like, impossible to pirate, so I settled for just reading about it 🙁
I was playing with BASIC on a commodore 64 when I was about 10.
I learnt C at 12.
Then discovered girls at 16 and didn’t touch code for another 7 years.
No regrets there 🙂
29, when I decided I wanted a career change and went to university to study I.T. I’m now loving writing code as a job, but I do wish I’d had the opportunity to learn when I was a kid. I feel like I’ll never be quite as instinctive about it as those who grew up with the skill.
First programming subject taught Scheme, an obscure pedagogical language that I’m pretty sure I’ll never touch again.
10 years old, on DOS 4.01 using GW Basic…
HTML & CSS at 14, PHP at 15, Objectice-C at 16.
My dad used to sit me down at a main-frame terminal when he had to go into work sometimes. In 1977, aged 7, I wrote basic code to lay out / print out the multiplication tables I needed to learn. Before that it was mostly simple scripts to control a plotter to draw pictures of planes and tanks and such like. For years I kept the earliest of these, stored as holes in a coil of paper tape, but it got lost somewhere.
Mucked around in HTML from when I was 13. Was taught basic scripts in Flash at 14, and learned MATLAB at uni at 18. I wish I was taught any coding in junior school 🙁
HTML at 14 for 5 months, stopped, then learned VB and Java at 18, C/C++/C# at 19, PHP at 21 and all of them at uni. I was never exposed to anything other than HTML nor did I like coding. I am just a techie person that made me go to programming.
4 or 5 years old.
10 PRINT “BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.?”,
20 GOTO 10
RUN
BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.?
BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.?
BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.?
BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.?
BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.?
BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.? BOOMZZILLA RULES O.K.?
etc.
Year 8, HTML. Then a few years later some simple PHP and Javascript.
About 7 yrs old.
QBasic. Dos somthing something (started at Dos 3, and went all the way to 6.22. Can’t remember what version running at the time)
However, the real thing that taught me to program was not using programming languages, but editing the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get different games to run.
This game requires XMM but not much base memory. This game required no XMM but heaps of base memory.
Trying to squeeze out those 1 or 2kB of memory to get a game to start was a real lesson. Finally started creating menus. With “Basic boot” (nothing fancy) right through to with the optimal settings for that game in autoexec.bat and config.sys
Year 8, QBasic, building an in-memory car sale system simulacrum, iirc. Year 10, HTML+CSS (and then PHP when I realised it was just a markup language).
About 10-11, I was around 5th-6th grade at the time when my older brother bought a VIC-20 with his life savings.
It’s much easier to start coding at age 7 when computers are moderately common. Our school had about three computers total in 7th grade, all Apple 2s kept under lock and key by the Maths department. Usually when the students had access, they were used mostly for games; even the main “class” activity was Lemonade Stand.
Learning a programming language early really gives you a leg-up on algebra.
Of course, received wisdom at the time was that comments slowed down your (BASIC interpreted) code, so the few samples of my coding from back then that I still have are almost unreadable.
I was 12 when my school got our first Apple 2 computer and I taught myself to program in BASIC. Have never stopped learning since – and my 16 yo daughter also loves to program – taught herself python in about 3 days so she could enter an online programming competition.
One of my first programs was to determine if a number was prime. After testing with a few smaller numbers, I entered my (six digit) phone number and it came back as a prime. I thought I’d made a programming error but after testing lots of other numbers and debugging the code, it turns out my phone number really was a six digit prime number. Taught me to always know what your test result should be – avoids wasting time chasing spurious errors.