I played around with some really simple programming throughout much of my life, but I didn't really learn how to program until I started college.
My first year, I took a course in C. It was pretty difficult for me, and I remember staying up all night trying to figure out how to properly allocate and free memory for my implementation of Conway's Game of Life. I learned quite a lot, though, and it made my future experiences with programming a lot easier to handle.
My second year, I took a course in MATLAB. The course was for physics students instead of computer science students, and MATLAB does a lot of things automatically that I had to fuss over with C, so the programming involved felt much simpler. I've used MATLAB a lot since then because it's popular among physicists and some mathematicians, but being aware of the subtle differences between it and most other programming languages (like how arrays start at index 1) makes it awkward to use sometimes.
In my fourth year, I took a course in Python to fulfill a requirement. The course was intended as an "introduction to programming" course for computer science students due to the high failure rate in the aforementioned C course. It was painfully simple, and all the conveniences of Python made it an easy language to pick up after learning C and MATLAB. I learned to really enjoy Python, though, and it's now my language of choice whenever I have to program something.
I don't program very much anymore now since my career path doesn't utilize programming very much, but I'm glad I took the time to learn it, and I still use it to work on personal projects from time to time. In particular, I've been teaching myself a little bit of
Processing to use with my art.
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