I don’t code anymore. Never really did it for a living other than hacking accounting software written in dBASE or FoxPro. (Ha! You get bonus points for even knowing what that is…and you probably were born prior to 1970.)
BUT…in 1977 myself and 2 other class mates in high school programmed our Texas Instrument TI59 programmable calculators to estimate the value of Pi by calculating the area of a circle by dividing a quadrant of the circle into rectangles of decreasing size. The first iteration divided the quadrant into 10 rectangles. The last time we ran it it did 1,000 rectangles. Took the poor calculator over 24 hours. Every time we wanted to run the program we had to re-enter the code…there was no way to save it. I don’t remember how close we got to the real value. But it was fun anyway.
My profile talks about my first coding, self-taught, on a Vic-20. I remember spending a lot of time typing in code (or reams of numbers for machine code) from magazines… Compute! magazine in particular. When I typed in the SpeedScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript word processor that was my first intro into really using a computer for anything serious (other than games.) My first paid programming was in GW-BASIC on a Compaq Luggable (with a small screen) I used the money from that job to buy my C-64.
Short of entering programs from magazines on my ZX Spectrum, I didn’t really do much programming as a kid, and really didn’t have a lot of interest in programming until university - my main interest was hardware. My first proper program I wrote was a CD catalogue written in Turbo Pascal while on an Electronics Engineering degree. That was when I found that my main interest and strength was in software and changed to a Computer Science degree, learning C and C++. After uni, my languages have been C, C++, Delphi, VB.NET, but mainly C#, and T-SQL (SQL Server).
Oh, man, your comment brought back memories from 1968. Jamaica High School got one of the first computers in a school for students that year, an IBM 1130. One of the only programs I ever tried to write myself (and in the process convinced myself I am not a programmer) was to calculate Pi by dropping a “pencil”. Fortran 4. Got the idea from Scientific American.