But seriously, I am grateful for all the awesome hackers that came before and continue with me. My tools and languages are far superior now than when I started.
Not sure how BASIC didn't make this list. Played around with it first on an old tandy my dad had and then got actually interested when I started learning ti-basic for the ti-86. First "modern" language was PHP, although I don't know if you can really count PHP3 as modern.
There's probably quite a few people who started out during the 8-bit micro era who will have some variant of BASIC or BASIC + assembly as a 'first language'. Pascal was widely used in higher education during roughly the same period.
Ah.. MASM, AFD, Peter Norton's PC Programmer's Bible... anybody remembers how that first hyper-link based helpfile was called with all the INTs and stuff ?
Although I studied programming (I was 13) one of those Soviet IBM System/360 clones in FORTRAN I did not like it. I was pretty much fascinated with Ataris which started to popup in USSR in late 80th, so I learnt 6502 assembly soon after I put my hands on one of 130XE. When IBM PCs came in I learnt x86 asm, then C and C++, but much much later :-)
I didn't have the luxury of ruby or python when I learned to program HTML--this was sometime in 1997/1998. I had cgi and perl, although I didn't use them too much.
Yeah, it was probably a bad decision. But I chose to go strictly by definition, and PHP is a "a widely-used general-purpose scripting language" (http://www.php.net/).
Javascript, HTML, and CSS are obviously very different from PHP, but they are all scripting languages.
I started with HyperCard as a kid. My parents got me a couple Java books but I never got into it. My first real programming experience was with Python when I was in high school. My dad told me that no one uses Python and that I should learn C++, so that's what I did. That was over 10 years ago so things have changed a bit with regard to Python :)
These days my favorites are C, Python, and Scheme.
Me too. then I discovered you could call interrupts in quickbasic and you could inject hand rolled ASM and execute it so upgraded to 4.5 and never looked back. rapid prototyping in DOS :)
C# (and the rest of the .NET paradigm along with it). once i got the taste of command-line + gcc in my first Computer Science courses, I never really looked back ..
As I said in the other thread... Visual Basic 6 when I was 14... I literally had to stop programming for about 3 years before I could start "fresh" again.
Beyond DOS/Windows batch files which are terrible but indeed a language, my first "real" language was Turing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language) ). It was mainly used in Canadian high schools - at least it was when I was there at the beginning of the decade.
I didn't like it but it had a full graphical environment that was pretty accessible to students. I liked that our particular IDE/interpreter was called WinOOT (Windows Object Oriented Turing) - OOT pronounced like the stereotypical Canadian pronunciation of about, "aboot". If that's not patriotic enough, it also had a built-in graphics function named drawmapleleaf.
Where's Assembler in the list :) I loved me some MASM. Did no one learn this in the late 80's early 90's? It must still be used a lot for embedded systems ...
What I liked about it was a) it was hard and made you really really think about what you where doing (in terms of memory and CPU usage) as you where in total control of both at all times and there was often no abstraction (well unless you wrote in binary I suppose). b) it was super tedious and required keeping a lot of code in your head at one time so when moving to say C/C++ it made you review your code with some sympathy of how it will run and how to optimise it (say rolled and unrolled loops etc). When things went wrong in C you could look at the produced ASM and understand perhaps why.
oh the memories! I just voted for BASIC (having self learned BBC Basic using school computers after school). Your post reminded me that I actually first started to learn to program asm on an ORIC 16k.
Yes, I voted for BASIC too but ASM was what I first messed around in on an Amstrad 512k using the manual that it came with. Remember when manuals had pin outs of all the ports and sometimes circuit digrams and included a reference manual of the CPU instruction set and sample programs?? Oh those where the days =)
I would also have voted for assembler if it was on the list, since that's actually the first language I ever used. (On a Magnavox Oddessey 2 game console, no less). I did choose BASIC, because that's the first language that I first successfully used. :)
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[ 2019 ms ] story [ 1895 ms ] threadBut seriously, I am grateful for all the awesome hackers that came before and continue with me. My tools and languages are far superior now than when I started.
Although I studied programming (I was 13) one of those Soviet IBM System/360 clones in FORTRAN I did not like it. I was pretty much fascinated with Ataris which started to popup in USSR in late 80th, so I learnt 6502 assembly soon after I put my hands on one of 130XE. When IBM PCs came in I learnt x86 asm, then C and C++, but much much later :-)
Javascript, HTML, and CSS are obviously very different from PHP, but they are all scripting languages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee
A beaut little machine for its time. Oh the hours lost to playing space invaders ...
These days my favorites are C, Python, and Scheme.
I didn't like it but it had a full graphical environment that was pretty accessible to students. I liked that our particular IDE/interpreter was called WinOOT (Windows Object Oriented Turing) - OOT pronounced like the stereotypical Canadian pronunciation of about, "aboot". If that's not patriotic enough, it also had a built-in graphics function named drawmapleleaf.
I didn't have storage for a while, so initially I had to type in my games every time before playing them.
Then I got a tape drive and spent months playing Tetra Horror :)
http://www.generation-msx.nl/msxdb/softwareinfo/227
What I liked about it was a) it was hard and made you really really think about what you where doing (in terms of memory and CPU usage) as you where in total control of both at all times and there was often no abstraction (well unless you wrote in binary I suppose). b) it was super tedious and required keeping a lot of code in your head at one time so when moving to say C/C++ it made you review your code with some sympathy of how it will run and how to optimise it (say rolled and unrolled loops etc). When things went wrong in C you could look at the produced ASM and understand perhaps why.
Do I miss it? Heeeeeellll no!