[auxym]

Heh, I started coding (in python) when I was about 15. One of my nerdy interests that motivated it was "historical" crypto (vigenère, etc). But another one of the first things I wrote was a script that would factor quadratic equations for me, in order to do my math homework for me. I really hated that kind of repetitive homework, where every night for weeks on end we'd have 25 equations to factor or whatever, even when I had already "gotten it".

It was pretty dumb, using the exact "algorithms" we were taught to do it by hand. It would even "show the work" so I could transcribe it. In the end, it probably took as much time to input the homework into the program, and then transcribe all the answers, making sure to fake it so it looked like I did the work, as just doing the homework. Not to mention actually writing the program, but that part was really fun. I remember turning on a small night light when I was supposed to be past bed time so I could scribble down algorithms or solutions to bugs on a piece of paper so I could implement them the next day.

If I had been a bit smarter, I might have realized that I could have used a CAS that already existed. Not sure if there were many open-source ones (that could run on windows) back then (2003-2004) though, just looked and sympy was released in 2007.