I feel like a noob too, mostly because I started at 18!
That's to say, I started taking programming seriously at 18. I did write a crappy Visual Basic exe when I was 8, and I dabbled a bit in Flash ActionScript in my teenage years, but I don't really count those years, because I was learning by rote then.
I really only started taking programming seriously when I was in college. Writing an RTOS from scratch was one of my biggest coding achievements. A lot of times, I wish I have a job that's more technically challenging than what I'm doing now.
I started at age 7 with BASIC on a C64. Then moved on to reading C and C++ books once I could read English. Yeah, I had to learn English before learning how to program. It makes me crack up every time I think about it. Anyhow, I had a, uh, rather interesting phase were I was into reverse-engineering programs and systems. Luckily, I did not have internet access until the end of that phase. Still remember having some fun learning stuff on IRC. By the time I was 20-ish, I was heavily into robotics. But back then the Arduino was not a reality, so it was mostly using PIC16F84 chips and 555 timers. And then I had another BASIC phase, which led me to discover Python. Then Lisp. Then Visual Basic, C#, and the .NET framework. Had too much fun with Python and Lisp. Love them both. Went back to them. I mostly do Python these days, but love writing Lisp whenever I can.
I started at 12 with C++, then I went over to 13 and learnt some Python, then I learnt Lisp at 16 and that's when I started to actually learn programming.
I know this sounds like a "lel Lisp is superior to your blub lang" but it's more of a "I actually went past procedural programming and stupid OO with Lisp and it felt like I finally actually knew something about the stuff I did".
Dunno why I'm typing this out though, oh what the heck, posting it anyway.
yep I can recall after a year or so at my first job I was considered a bit flash because I used mixed case in my FORTRAN hollerith statements just made the prompts look nice on our PDP11's
In fact having basic prompts whit told the user what the next input was was an innovation I refactored some of the senior guys code to add prompts he was a bit sniffy.
"i know what to type when " which is ok for an experiment at 3 foot scale but scaled up to 1:1 where filling the rigs tank cost 20K (about 1/2 the cost of a house at the time) making sure you didn't blow a run was more important.
