[scott_s]

My first program was indeed C++. In 1998, my high school had a computer lab setup with Turbo C++, and I took a non-AP computer science class. In college, starting in 1999, after entering as a computer science major, we were guided to use Visual C++ on Windows. We got Visual C++ from our department - I can't remember if we paid or if it was just provided to us.

[taeric]

Ah, I see that not only did I accidentally force you to prove this, but I accidentally got others to do so. My humble apologies on that!

I'm not super shocked that some people got started with Visual C++ sooner than I would have had access to it. It remains surprising to me, though. See my other post on more of the why, for that.

[rramadass]

Visual C++ is actually very easy to get started with (it wasn't my first though) You run a wizard which generates a full, runnable, skeleton application into which you can then easily plugin code from a book (thank you David Kruglinski). I had done Win32 C programming (thank you Charles Petzold) prior to getting into Visual C++ and it was shocking to see how the IDE/Wizards really made complicated things extremely easy. In fact many of the noob programmers in my team didn't even know how to run the compiler, assembler, linker separately (they did not come from a Unix background) since the IDE did it all for you at the press of a function key.