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What Was Your First Programming Language?
Thinking back, I initially thought it was Level Basic for the TRS-80, but Eric's post reminded me the first thing I programmed was an HP calculator, mostly so I could use it to cheat in class :-) After the TRS-80 I programmed my Apple IIe in Applesoft Basic, which was much better than its predecessor because it could do floating point numbers. Does anyone remember numbering your lines counting in tens so you had room to add other lines in the middle?
Applesoft Basic Aloha World:
10 TEXT:HOMEThe first time I saw Amiga basic I was thrown by the fact there were no line numbers.
20 ? "Aloha World!"
AmigaBASIC Aloha World:
PRINT "Aloha World!"The progression of languages I learned from grade school to today:
Level I Basic (TRS-80) -> Applesoft Basic -> Amiga Basic -> Pascal -> Objective C (remember NeXTcube?) -> Python -> Java & C#
How about you?
Comment
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Comment by Steve Craven on October 28, 2011 at 7:52am -
Fortran 4H on the UH mainframe when I was a grad student in 1972.
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Comment by Thomas Olausson on May 4, 2011 at 1:37pm -
My first programming language was Basic on a Commodore VIC-20.
Like many computers of that era, you booted your machine to a prompt where you could type code right away.
I loved that simplicity.
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Comment by GB Hajim on April 7, 2010 at 6:31pm -
This thread is turning into a geek version of macho bravado. Basic was really my first language that I learned, but I concurrently learned Assembly and Machine language. I remember my first project in Machine was to come up with my own character outside the ASCII. Built it bit by bit with 010101101s.
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Comment by Mary St. John on April 7, 2010 at 4:37pm -
These are some dusty brain cells but let's see.... BASIC on an Apple IIe in junior high at school and an IBM PC (one of the first?) at home. I remember "goto" and my first infinite loop too. "To infinity and beyond!" But most of that sector in my brain has since been reformatted and overwritten with things like dirty jokes or quotes from Buzz Lightyear. Although I did meet a guy the other day named Pascal and asked: "like the programming language?" (vs. the scientist or the unit of pressure) so maybe their are still a few fragments that remain...
Progression: BASIC -> Pascal -> C -> Ada -> Visual Basic -> C++ -> php -> 12-step program for recovering programmers :)
Side note: when I worked for JPL/NASA from 1991 - 1993 my timecards (which I wrote on) consisted of some kind of punch card with the lopped-off corner and a few mysterious rectangular holes!
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Comment by Francis L. Camacho on April 7, 2010 at 4:18pm -
BASIC
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Comment by Ken Berkun on April 7, 2010 at 4:16pm -
Excuse me, we wrote text games in Microsoft Basic on Altairs and IMSAIs. Whoops, showing my age. Actually my first game was tic-tac-toe written in Algol running on a Burroughs mainframe (B6700) and displayed on Tektronix graphics terminals (the famous green flashers). The graphics interface was my final project for my computer graphics class, circa 1976. You used wheels to move the x/y indicators to where you wanted to move, no graphics cursor on that device.
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Comment by Daniel Leuck on April 7, 2010 at 4:07pm -
Hi David - That looks like a lot more fun than the way guys my age were introduced to programming. We wrote text games on TRS-80s :-) Thank you for sharing.
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Comment by David on April 7, 2010 at 4:04pm -
My first exposure to any type of programming was in my high school days with Starcraft's map/campaign editor. The editor was amazing because anyone without experience in programming could still create mini-games like Pacman, poker, or even lengthy RPGs.
The editor had if-else statements, loops, and switches. I remember my first encounter with an infinite loop that caused a whole bunch of units to spawn and max the map out. It was very similar to assembly language, plus I didn't have any concept of organization or abstraction at the time so debugging was a complete nightmare.
I also did some Visual Basic programming for a class in high school. It only covered if-else statements and printing so I didn't learn much. Java was my first official language that I learned at UH. I'm currently learning C, C++, and plan to add on a few database and scripting languages before I graduate.
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Comment by Cameron Souza on April 7, 2010 at 4:03pm -
Hi David. I think more and more people are going to be introduced to programming the same way you were - by scripting their favorite game or virtual world. Its a great, fun way to start!
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Comment by Kevin Talbot on December 11, 2009 at 1:29pm -
My first language was Fortran. On punch cards. I know this shows my age! We used the punch cards to run batch jobs in the "computer center" at my college on the mainframe computer. Also learned BASIC as well back then, but also on punch cards.
Eventually I got an Apple II as my first computer and really got into learning Apple BASIC and then Pascal which I really liked. I found Pascal to be a really good, well structured language.
Also used to do a lot of coding with the dBASE II database language on IBM PCs and then the complied version with the "Clipper" compiler. This was the mid to late 80's. Clipper/dBASE II was a very nice language for manipulating large databases with tens of thousands of records quite easily. State of the art for that day.
We've come a long way from Fortran and punch cards to the object oriented/visual programming languages of today. I have _no_ longing for those "good old days".
© 2013 Created by Daniel Leuck.
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