I'm currently a PhD student and have studied CS. I started programming as a hobby at the age of about 9 (Basic on a Commodore C64) if I remember correcly and progressed from there (Pascal, Delphi, Java). But only recently (about 3 yrs ago) I started learning and using the C++ language which comes in quite handy for the performance critical computations I'm mostly doing right now (tomography, other big nonlinear optimization problems).