What was your first programming language?

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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Python, Shenzhen I/O’s and EXAPUNKS’s together.

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It was a BASIC dialect on the ABC 80 computer (ABC 80 - Wikipedia). This was in school. After having got a taste of it I quickly bought a Z80 Spectrum+ (ZX Spectrum - Wikipedia) which I also programmed on in BASIC (the keyboard featured the keywords of the language directly on the keys).

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Great to see that Zachtronics’ games are having a real impact :slight_smile: I loved playing every one of them

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My first contact was with MEL (Maya Embedded Language) and Python. I worked with those as a 3D Artist to build scripts.
When I change careers 2 years ago, I first started learning Kotlin (was looking into mobile development at the moment) and now JavaScript

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I started to learn programming with Java at my first programming job.
Picked up some Python with an edx course in my spare time.
I was lucky enough to learn Ruby at university, which really made me fall in love with programming and showed me how much fun it can be. Got into web development with Rails and Sinatra.
Also lucky enough to learn Prolog and Erlang and to dabble a little bit in Assembler and C, all at uni.
For a while I was really excited for Elixir, as I almost had as much fun with it as in my early Ruby days, but haven’t found time for it in quite a while.
Picked up some Scheme and a tiny bit of Common Lisp over the years, but mainly write Emacs Lisp, when it comes to Lisps.

At work I currently mostly write Java and JavaScript for applications, plus a tiny bit of Ruby from time to time, for our Asciiddoctor setup. Bash, Python and Groovy for scripts.

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Python and Pseint :smile: I like python more these days and I try my best to do mini projects.

3 posts were split to a new topic: About the Lisps

I started with BASIC on a Sinclair ZX-81 which had 1 KB of RAM. A bit later I learned to program it in assembler too.

This was followed by Commodore 64 with Basic and a bit of 65xx Assembler.

My first PC was next where I learned Pascal and developed several apps which I used for years. I still have the code somewhere.

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Hi! I started with BASIC on a Commodore 64. I don’t recall whether C or Pascal was second.

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Happily I could choose “Computers” in high school where we learnt Visual Basic. We later did some Turbo Pascal, just to appreciate what all Visual Basic was doing for us. So this was my first programming language.

What followed were to various degrees Java, C++, C#, Python, PHP, Java again, Ruby and just enough JavaScript to get by.
Most comfortable with Ruby currently.

I had no access to computers until I started university, then they gave us an “Intro to Scientific Programming” class in FORTRAN IV. Punch-cards (I’d never used a keyboard before), fed to an IBM 370/165 mainframe. The card punches were about the price of a decent car, amazing engineering, but provided no way to type lower-case letters (no need - the compiler would have rejected them as invalid). Output was on 14" fanfold paper, after the operator had torn it off the line printer and passed it out of the secure area for pickup.

Progress was rapid. A few months later I switched to ALGOL W, an early block-structured language (precursor of Pascal), then got access to teletypes: loud, but it was really useful to see the (many) error messages appear right in front of me within 30 seconds.

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I had first a brief encounter with Sinclair BASIC. However, the first time I really tried to programme (and not re-type somebody else’s programmes) the language I had access to was Turbo Pascal followed by ASM (to do game graphics), C (because ASM was hard), and Borland C++, because by then I wanted to write programmes with windows! That wasn’t as easy as I hoped, so, I moved to Delphi and then Visual Basic.

Around the turn of millennia I doubled in PHP and early JavaScript and the experience had put me off of web development for a decade! Luckily soon it was 2002 and the .NET Framework was out which I first tried with VB.NET but soon switched to C# that became my main programming language for the next two decades. I was eleventh time lucky, I suppose.

I have used other languages since then: JScript, AtScript, TypeScript, Clarion, Ruby, Java, Dart, Python. In fact, Python has been my main, day-to-day language for the last 18 months, but C# is still the only track I mentor here!

What’s next? Well, after the Functional February I think I’ve got a new favourite! I just don’t know where I’m going to use it yet. Elixir.

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My first experience programming at university was in a course on computational physics where we studied Fortran and Matlab. This was about 10 years ago so no punch cards but it’s funny to hear how long it’s stuck around!

C64 version of BASIC was my first, along with 6510 assembly.

I learned Basic on a Vech Genius Leader 2000, which was a children’s computer for math quizzes, word activities, grammar, language learning; and funny enough, on this 1MBit machine with a 2x20 column dot-matrix display you could also do Basic. I first only used it for its educational games, but then I got that included booklet into my hands and that contained a tutorial for programming Basic, and so I started writing my first program - Something I could store a secret in. It would ask the user for its name and its password. If my name was entered it would show me my secret; if my brothers name was entered, it would tell him “hands off!” - and if a wrong password was entered, it assumed it was my brother and would print “haha, nice try, little brother. now go away” :rofl:

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First programming language I changed was for a game called Nibbles in QBasic on an old Dos o/s using command prompt UI running on a 386 desktop at the age of 13 back in 1995. Been dabbling in various programming languages ever since.

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I started with C :sweat_smile:

I was introduced to programming in high school, where I learned C (my first language), C++, C#, Java, PHP, HTML, and JavaScript. However, I never used them outside of class lessons or homework. After high school, I stepped away from IT for a while, until one day during an internship at a small company, the boss took me and the team to Brussels to attend FOSDEM. There, I discovered LISP. Upon returning home, I began learning it, I learned more about LISP on my own in a few months than a few years of C# at school. Soon after, I found a more modern version of LISP: Clojure. I’ve never looked back since. Functional programming brought me back to IT.

I started with Scratch (at high school) and then learned some Python. And continued my journey with C/C++ and Java (at university).