It's not always your first exposure that you later identify as a catalyst.

I'm an American that took a C++ class in Europe when I was 13 (forward thinking school in retrospect). But when asked, I usually say scripting RS bots was what got me into the field, because I had fun and it was more memorable.

But would I have chosen to do that had I no idea what coding was? Maybe not...

Absolutely agreed.

I had a trash-80 in the early 80s and used to copy BASIC from magazines, and then in the mid 90s I bought a book with a CD in it that taught me how to set up perl-based e-commerce store, which I set up for my mom's retail shop. Neither of those got me interested in programming.

The event in my life that got me there was around 2000, when I bought a Cold Fusion 4 book off of a street vendor - literally on Wall Street - and I spent my evenings building an intranet that replaced the Access database that my company shipped and merged across the country every Friday.

That's when I got hooked, and started building my career (and hobby).

Not sure if something like Scratch would have gotten me there (LOGO definitely didn't) - but I imagine the level of comfort I had with computers at a young age kept me in the vicinity that eventually got me there.

> not always your first exposure

Great point. How many professional sports players credit their elementary aged PE classes to their success in sport (as opposed to say crediting a high school coach)?

Progressive, unbridled access and exposure is key.

I feel like the baseline teaching is trivially necessary, and should simply be assumed in these kinds of assessments. Getting someone to invest themselves emotionally into a subject is both infinitely harder and valuable, and should always be the focal point.

That is, the true “origin” isn’t worth much — the origin of interest is whatever kicked off the feedback loop of joy —> learning —> joy (in my own case, it was learning djikstra’s algorithm)

I very first got into programming by trying to fix a graphic adventure game that somehow was released with a pretty clear syntax error. This was back in the VIC-20 days. Really, for the first while it was about the games ... tweaking them, altering them, and later writing them.

The actual programming was always a means to that gaming end back then and not the end in itself. So in that sense I can completely relate to where you're coming from.

Over a couple years of that, it started to dawn on me that the programming itself had a power and interest all its own worth pursuing.

But I think if it was dropped in front of me as something I ought to do, no matter how dressed up in "fun" it was, it would have set off my non-conformist predispositions a little too much.