Forums → Programming Forum → How did you guys start?

So a while ago I was bored in the summer and found out you could
Make flash games and post them on sites like these, and honestly I think one of the biggest things for me was the money. It's stupid I know, but anywho now I have a job and I'm going on with life as usual... All except the thought keeps crossing my head about this I'll check the forums and get hyped up and want to start with flash, but then I realize flash is 700 dollars... And this happens and that, and within a week or two I forgot about it completely. But the thing is that it sounds like a lot of fun to me... And I think the reason it went wrong the first time was I jumped into complicated stuff with the hope of selling some stupid game I made... But I actually enjoyed most of it, I loved it when I got the square to move across the screen, or when I got it so I could control it with my mouse...and the other day I was bored in math, and I grabed my graphing calculator and put in equations in the graph to make cool desings, and sometimes the line I meant to make whent wrong and I looked back at the equations to see I put a negative wrong or something, and I absolutely love blaring music and staying up on the computer all night, doing whatever. So I know it would be fun, but I can't afford flash and I've tried flashdevelop and things similar and they just bug me. What I want to hear about is veteran programmers, how they started. Any feedback?