Working in the tech industry day in, day out, we can become jaded to the reality of just how cool programming actually is. As humans, we've figured out how to get inanimate objects to calculate things for us:

I can vaguely remember how it felt the first time I wrote a program. I took C++ class and a Java class in high school and I think I took the Java class first. I remember that the syntax didn't make any sense to me at the time but I thought it was really cool how you could type something into the command line and your program could take your input and manipulate it and return a result.

I was really into creating text-based games and GUIs seemed way too advanced to even consider learning. I'm sure that's influenced my programming preferences today, as I still stick with languages that I mostly interact with through the command line (not too much web / graphical work for me).

Then, everyone got Xanga accounts (remember that, USA people?) and was trying to customise their profiles, so I started learning HTML and CSS. There were so many acronyms for different kinds of "cutting edge" web design at the time: XHTML, DHTML, etc. It all seems so quaint now.

What was your first coding experience like? Was it decades ago or last month? Was it nerve-wracking or exciting?