Fun little discussion on how people got into programming.
I started by writing simple VBA macros to automate Excel at work. A buddy that sat nearby studied engineering in school and showed me some of the basics. From then on it was hitting the ‘record’ button and googling what popped up!
My programming has always been focused on data management and analysis. I learned SQL in the Stanford DB course and Matlab/Octave in the Stanford ML class. I took up Python to build a simple weather webapp which I’ve never finished then bolted on scipy and numpy after reading some Kaggle winners’ submissions. Now I use Python all the time. The webapp project also introduced me to django (which I rejected – too painful to learn), some ftp syncing automation, sqlite, and a bunch of rudimentary php and javascript/jquery.
I’m messing around with C, now, but I can’t see a great reason for ditching Python yet. I still don’t really know what an Object is (wtf is __init__?) though I’d love to learn about it eventually.
Not Unreasonable 