What Was Your First Programming Language?

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Comment by Rico Moreno on July 22, 2009 at 10:05am

Started at BTL/Holmdel,NJ programming for the first EPBX Call processing programs in FAP on an IBM 709/7094. This was part of ATT's switch to Electronic Central Offices from mechanical cross-bar and step-by-step systems. Program input was Hollerith punched cards ... output was also punched card with the program bit pattern to magnetize the EPBX memory, which were ferrite squares bonded onto a metal plate ... forming a 128x64 bit plane - there were several racks of these to hold the program ... forerunner to the FPROM!! -- Not to date myself but this was in the 1963 to 1965 time frame. The Electronic Switching Central Offices also used this technology.

Comment by David C. Brauer on July 2, 2009 at 9:13am

My first language was LISP back in the days of AI machines. It was a great language for debugging and for recursive functions. I worked on a Xerox Dandelion for Dave Stoutemeyer in the U.H engineering school.

Comment by Sebastian Bozlee on April 24, 2009 at 7:42pm

I don't have quite as much history as the rest of you. My first language was Python (just if-elif-else statements). A few years later, I learned C#, then C++, then C.

Comment by Ken Berkun on April 13, 2009 at 6:43pm

Peter, yes I remember Basic on paper tape! And also stored on Tarbell cassette tapes! And DECtape! My first real language (skipping Focal on the PDP8 which I didn't use enough to count) was FORTRAN. But within a year I was writing in Algol and I consider that my first language - a very fortunate first language because most people had to wait for Pascal to learn structured programming. I've experimented with (probably) every major language, but mostly I now use C and C++. LISP is very cool and I have friends who still use it. For scripting there is Perl but I don't do Web programming any more so I haven't touch Ruby or Rails or any thing in that mode.

Ken

Comment by Paul Graydon on April 10, 2009 at 9:02am

My first programming language was BASIC on a Spectrum Z80. Graduated to BASIC on a Speccy 128k+, then VBA in Access and Excel, before finally learning Perl last year and starting on c++ this year.

Comment by Peter on April 2, 2009 at 9:43am

Anyone remember Basic on punch tape? The machine looked like a very large metal typewriter and the little holes punched out of the paper tape made a huge mess. Fortran punch cards at the University of Minnesota, rumor had it that in the 80s, when the machines were finally retired, the engineering students dumped them off the bridge into the Mississippi river. First two years of Computer Science classes were taught in Pascal, numerical analysis classes in Fortran, AI in LISP. We ran on CDC (Control Data Corp) Cyber super computers. The assembly language class ran on a DEC PDP11 emulator running on the Cyber. Then, into the "real" world and Fortran and DCL on DEC Vax 11/780s, a little Cobol, then lots of C, C++, Visual Basic, and C#. Things have definitely improved (and yet some things remain the same)
Another interesting thread might be terminals. When I was a computer science student I purchased a VT100 terminal with an acoustic coupler modum (300 baud rate) so I could call into school and work on projects from home. The keyboard was permanently attached to the monitor. Then things got really modernized when the vt220s came out with their amber colored text.

Comment by John Barrett on March 30, 2009 at 5:54pm

While studying Meteorology at sfsu, they has us take FORTRAN 77, and at the time I loved it.

Comment by Nate Sanders on February 13, 2009 at 12:42am

BASIC, first, on various machines (Apple II+, Atari 8-bit computers, then the IBM PC). Microsoft BASIC was probably the best line-numbered basic I had seen at the time. Kaypro had S-BASIC that stood for "Structured BASIC", I believe and had more modern control structures and no line numbers and compiled to machine code! I also programmed in Logo and PILOT on the Atari 800. I was really young, though, and most of this was just screwing around, but it definitely had an impact on me.

What had the biggest impact, whatsoever, though, was attending an academic camp at Western Kentucky University in between 7th and 8th grade that was part of a cooperative agreement with the Duke University Talent Identification Program (TIP). We stayed in college dorms and went to intensive 6-hour per day classes + study hall and learned Turbo Pascal: A real language with user-defined composable data-types and a compiler. We learned a little about data structures and sorting and a few other algorithms. It was all extremely eye-opening. Immediately after the camp was over, I bought Turbo Pascal 5.5 even got to see what OOP was all about. Not long after, I bought Turbo C 2.0 and read a book on C, as well as the User's Guide and Reference Guide included with Turbo C.

That camp was the spark that led to many late-night hacking sessions. It was definitely one of the most important events in my life.

Comment by Rob Bertholf on October 31, 2008 at 2:07pm

I started programming in basic wrote a few text-based games in 93, but it wasn't till 95 that anything caught on. I wrote a few games on the TI-83, one racing game was all the rage getting passed around at Track meets all over northern California.... beats paying attention during algebra class!

Comment by JW Guillaume on July 22, 2008 at 6:55am

I also started with the Vic-20, and BASIC. I wrote a football handicapping program for my betting friends. I remember discovering that all the commands could be replaced with memory saving two character codes. By the time I saw other computer languages I could not understand how they worked without line numbers.

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