> so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual.

:)

I started learning English as a kid to understand what was happening on the MS BASIC programs I could get on my computer by the time.

I remember the penny dropping when I learned what "if" meant in English (I already knew what it did in BASIC).

Same here

Same thing here! I never would've learned English if it wasn't for GW BASIC and Windows 98 - certainly not in the crappy schools of the post-war Bosnia!

I also got started on GW-BASIC (on DOS 3.3).

Twenty years later, I'm still writing way too much Basic code (VB6 legacy apps and some VB.NET). I do appreciate a lot of things about the syntax and wish C# had picked them (no semicolons and no case sensitivity).

Hey, it sounds very similar to how I learned programming. That's how I started too, apart from the fact that I had a simple Turbo Pascal book from the beginning, but I also learned writing programs using an illegal Delphi 2 CD.

Nice!

For me it was Microsoft BASIC on the early Macintosh and this magical book from 1985: https://smile.amazon.com/Macintosh-Midnight-Madness-Utilitie... (Wow, I can't find the actual cover art anywhere! It was much cooler than what's shown there.)

HEY! That's it! Your Google-fu is greater than mine...

Ditto! I feel the same way. I learned both English and programming on Delphi 3. The first program I wrote showed and hid a picture on the screen. I wrote a few games, but didn't understand types and generics until years later.

Same story here !

For nostalgia's sake, may I ask what games/software you developed at the time ?

On my end, I did:

  - Snake, and a Snake level editor,
  - Sokoban, and a Sokoban level editor,
  - an adventure game Zelda (NES) alike (but was not fun at all !)
  - Graphic calculator (to help me visualize the change of parameters quickly),
  - a software to visualize my grades compared to the rest of the group
  - I made a software to search and categorize html tags

(during my high school years)

What impressed me the most at the time, was that my binary file compiled on Windows ME would work directly on my other computer with Windows 3.1.

This is something I still really enjoy today with Go(lang); the fact that I can just compile for other platforms and run it natively.

It's really cool to see how many people shared the same experience!

In random order, and off the top of my head:

    - pong
    - some various demo where I would simulate fireworks or 
      traveling through star (in other words particles that are
      rendered by drawing dots and circles on screen)
    - a car racing game viewed from the top
    - an RPG engine but never actually made a level
    - a claw machine
    - and finally my own remake of space invader where you could
      play up to 4 in coop and upgrade your weapons. It had bosses
      and swarms of enemies. I learn then there was a limit of how
      many keys you can press on a keyboard before your computer starts beeping.

This is one thing I really really liked about Go, but unfortunately I don't really like the rest of Go very much. What are other languages that have this property? Building an ".exe" I can send to a Windows user is not a pleasant exercise in Python.

For windows, you can use .Net (which usually comes by default on windows distributions, so you should be able to send it and run without any issues). C# is a good language that uses it.

So it's not really native (it runs on a VM), but it produces the .exe that can be easily shared.

On the topic of Delphi, try FreePascal / Lazarus? Free, dependency free development even with GUI designer. FreePascal (non-GUI) supports an ungodly number of platforms!

Otherwise, can't recall much else, discounting cheating with e.g py2exe.

Years of boring english courses, but I really learned when I had to read the manual of my TRS-Color!

I started programming in basic (first on ZX spectrum clone, then QBasic) but really started writing meaningful programs in BP7 and then Delphi. On the other hand I'm pretty sure that I learned english by printing out the whole readme for Build engine that was on the Duke Nukem 3D CD and reading that.

This is such an awesome story! Good for you and your initiative, going to bookstore every day to read the book.

I came from Turbo Pascal, it was never the same but Delphi was such an awesome environment that I enjoyed making things with it.

This sounds like me, except the year was 1986, and the software on the bunch of floppies was Borland Turbo Pascal. Included photocopied manuals too.

This is pretty much my story as well, I learned how to program for real on Delphi 2. Though I was able to get someone to buy me the book. Thanks for sharing.

For me it was Turbo Pascal 5.5. It was amazing!