[cafard]

I learned to code at 18. I did not fall in love with programming: this owed at least in part to Fortran IV, punch cards, and a Burroughs mainframe that was often under maintenance. But I coded a craps game simulation, and passed.

I relearned to code at 31 or so. There was data over here that I needed in a different format over there, and didn't care to retype. I taught myself some minicomputer assembler from the instruction set reference. At that same job, I learned to write macros in the OS's command-line interpreter. I found that I enjoyed programming. And I went back to school.

That was a while ago, long enough that the second or third language that I learned on my own was Perl 4. I would never have called myself a ninja or a rockstar. Yet I have over the years written some very useful code.