What was your first programming language?

I always find it intriguing where people started.

I started with Easy AMOS - a variant of BASIC on the Amiga, graduated to full AMOS (and AMOS 3D :heart_eyes:) and then to C++, before a winding road through Java, Pop11, Prolog, JavaScript (old skool JS) and C# to eventually landing at Ruby as my main go-to-language for most of my career so far!

batch, BASIC and C are all contenders as my possibly first language.

  • We had a computer with DOS 6.2 on it. My brother set up a autostart.bat script that would present a menu which can be used to run various games, etc.
  • BASIC was on the machine and my sisters were learning BASIC in school. I played around with it a bit.
  • We had a “C for Dummies” book in the house and TurboC on the computer. That’s the language where I started actually writing programs.

Logo is probably a pretty common first language for regions of the world.

The BASIC dialect of the TRS-80 DOS

RGSS which is Ruby, then GML which is GameMaker Language, and ActionScript (RIP) was third.

TI-BASIC 83 in high school for passing time making games. My first semi-serious language was VBA since I had a difficult undergraduate class in using the third-party ArcObjects COM components. A few years after college, I picked up Python as my first serious language.

I started with Commodore Basic 3.5 (on a Commodore Plus/4).

I started with C (not the easiest path :D).

Locomotive BASIC on an Amstrad CPC6128, back in 1986. Closely followed by LOGO on the same

Applesoft BASIC on an Apple ][+

QuickBASIC 4.5

C# :star_struck: since three month! I just finished a mastercourse and now I am here to practice!

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I think it would be Microsoft QBasic. MATLAB was the first language I did anything productive with, and Racket is what I consider my “real first language” since it’s the one I was first able to learn to a level beyond copying code out of books or off websites.

It’s been a long time, but I would say it was a mix of Logo (at school, with the cute but pixelated turtle), BASIC (for fun), batch scripting (for the family business computer), TurboPascal (one of my first coding classes), and the macro language for WordPerfect (I helped do the mail-merges for the monthly billing).

(Thinking back, my parents took advantage of my programming skills quite a bit when I was growing up… :wink:)

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Canon had a programmable calculator called Canola and it was my first experience of programming. The year was 1977 and I was in my second-last year of secondary school. This was well before LEAR (Low-Erucic Acid Rapeseed) oil began to be marketed as Canola (CANada Oil Low Acid).

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Second year of high school I took part in the ‘webdesign’ extracurricular activity, where I was introduced to PHP and JavaScript – not sure in which order. Thereafter I did a Java course, and maybe some other languages. But then, december 2012, I encountered Haskell. It has since become my ‘mother tongue’, so to speak: I have forgotten most of what came before. A few years later I was required to learn Python at university; it is now a contender for my most familiar language, alongside Haskell.

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Started with C. Tried to use Allegro to code a game and was frustrated by the complexity (which I much later understood to be OOP retrofitted into a purely imperative language) :sweat_smile:

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I have tried to learn c++ many years age but finally gave up.
The first programming language I have really spent a lot of time on is Python.

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I’ve been around computers since I was a kid, but my real interest for programming only started on my high school years.

I noticed my graphics calculator had this “Program” menu where you could write programs. Initially, I started writing programs to automate my homework, so I guess technically my first language was TI-Basic.

In university I then took biomedical sciences for a year where there was a class on programming and they taught us Java, so my first “computer language” was Java. I then moved from biomedical sciences to a software engineering course (very similar to computer science, almost all classes were the same) and in the first year they taught C and Haskell. So my first “more serious” programs were in C and Haskell.

In those years and having gone through all these first languages, probably the language that “shaped me” the most as a developer was C. I learned C when I was taking the whole programming thing more seriously, and it was the language I spent the most time learning until then. We had a medium-sized project in C for a class where we had to implement data structures and some algorithms to make a CLI app work. I learned a lot on that project and after having finished it, I distinctively remember that it was the first time I felt like a “real programmer”, whatever that means.

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Received an Atari 400 for Christmas when they came out, so my first programming forays involved writing text adventures for my schoolmates using Atari Basic.

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