Personally, I started off with Roblox back in the early 2010s, and taught myself Lua. I really liked those Tycoon games, and wanted to see how they worked.
I eventually found Minecraft (like every kid back in the day did), and learnt Java to make Bukkit server mods.
Around 2016 I thought websites were kinda cool, so I started learning HTML, CSS, and JS, and I’ve been in the web dev space ever since.
What about the rest of y’all? What’s your personal programming path?
I can’t even remember what motivated me to get into programming in the first place. I do remember playing around in QBASIC. Eventually, I wanted my own website so I learned HTML, CSS, and PHP. I enjoyed it but because I was horrid at math in school, I determined I was better off not going to post-secondary for comp sci. Went for graphic design instead. I ended up with an on/off relationship with programming for a long time. Funny enough, there were a couple of courses in my graphic design program that touched on programming. Data Visualization, we used Processing for that one. Game Design, we used GameMaker and Unity3D.
But once again, I convinced myself that programming isn’t something I can get into professionally because math. Kept trying to push through the growing anxiety of art/design. Recently, I finally made the decision to no longer stop myself from pursuing a career in programming just because my math is lacking. Plus my anxiety had gotten so bad that I couldn’t fathom the idea of having an “art” job anymore.
Funny enough, I enjoyed math when I was writing code for that Unity3D school project. Go figures.