What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Geoff Quickfall]

Arrrtghhhh, don't remind me; ALGOL W.

Then fortran, then basic, then hp line programming.

But yuck, ALGOL W, punch cards and a typewriter at 2am in comp science, 1975.

[HrastProgrammer]

[Calculator] Keystroke on TI-57 in 1983.
[Interpreter] BASIC on ZX Spectrum in 1984.
[Assembler] Z80 on ZX Spectrum in 1985.
[Compiler] Pascal on ZX Spectrum in 1985.
...

[Katie Wasserman]

BASIC in 1972(?) on a Data General Nova 1200(?) in our high school -- BASIC had to be loaded from punch tape, then you used the ASR 33 Teletype for writing programs.

Starting in 1974: Fortran (just taught myself for fun), APL (we had to use this physics lab -- crazy -- and for fun) , BRUIN (I doubt that anyone ever used this but me), PL/I (for a computational linguistics course), LISP (for an early AI course)

In 1977: 6502 machine language (hand assembled) on my Commodore PET 8K.

[Katie Wasserman]

(07-03-2015 08:38 PM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  That brings up a secondary question. What do we call the language of our calculators? RPN is the notation and "keystroke" is the method, but what's the language?

HP never gave it a name as far as I know. They seemed lackluster in naming their languages early on. On their HP3000 stack-oriented mini computers they called their pretty nifty low-level language: SPL - System Programming Language. So maybe they, or we, should just call it Calculator Programming Language - CPL.

[Brian D]

Basic -> 6502 Assembly -> Fortran -> Forth (wrote my own compilers several times) -> C, Pascal, 6800 assembly , Prolog, whatever else they thought was cool in college at the time -> 68000 assembly -> various microcontroller assembly on the job -> LaTeX ( takes the cake for complexity if you dive deep into it )

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

My first programming language was Fortran on punched cards. At that time, Fortran was THE language to teach in the first course on programming. It actually served me well. I ended up becoming involved in energy conservation and maintained/enhanced a large fortran energy conservation computer program for many years from 1978 - 1995.

My second language was Pascal, then PL/1. I never did Basic until I purchased my first PC - a Radio Shack Model I in the 1970's.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(07-03-2015 09:10 PM)TASP Wrote:  My first was SNOBOL and it ran on an IBM 370.

SNOBOL was a very interesting language. My first exposure to it was in the 70's. I needed to take the source code of a fortran program, and then replace all the output statements with two statements - one to go to the printer output and one to go to a tape file. A professor recommended I use Snobol to do that. I still have a couple of SNOBOL languages for the PC. Haven't used them in years.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

[Marcus von Cube]

(07-04-2015 10:24 AM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  SNOBOL was a very interesting language.

I remember having written a tool in STRUBOL, a SNOBOL preprocessor which added some structured programming to it. The tool helped me to format my diploma thesis written on a 3270 terminal without German umlauts. It replaced ae with ä and was full of exception rules (e. g. leave 'Feuer' as is and don't change it to 'Feür'). The tool did a remarkable job. The output went into a formatting tool which in turn feed a gigantic laser printer.

To complete my above mentioned list of computer languages:

BASIC -> FORTRAN IV -> SIMULA -> STRUBOL (see above) -> Z80 assmbler -> C -> C++ -> COBOL 85 (on Tandem) -> TACL (Tandem Command Language) -> REXX (on OS/2) -> Java -> ABAP-OO.

The list is most probably incomplete as it contains mainly the languages I actually used (or still use) for my projects.

[Sylvain Cote]

(07-03-2015 05:51 PM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  What was your first programming language?

On calculators: RPN on HP-33E in 1979
> AOS-58 > RPN-41 > RPL-28 > RPL-48 > RPN/RPL on all HP calculators

On computers: BASIC on Apple II+ in 1981
Here is a partial list of computer languages that I have learned and for most, used professionally ...
: BASIC (MS-Basic, VB, VB.NET, ...), Assembler (6502/6809/Z80/8086/...), COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1,
: Pascal (USCD, Turbo, Delphi, ...), XBase (DBase, Clipper, ...), shell scripting (batch, c/korn/bourne, REXX, ...)
: Forth, C Unix/K&R/ANSI/C99/C11, PERL, Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk (Smalltalk/V, VisualAge),
: C++ 1/2/98/03/11/14 (compilers: Glockenspiel, Zortech, C-Front, MS, Borland, GNU, LLVM, ...)
: Objective-C, Ada, Java, Ruby, C#, AspectJ and currently learning Swift

IMHO,
Programming languages brings, for some, new programming paradigms (procedural, object, declarative, aspect, functional, early/late binding, static/dynamic dispatch, etc).
The initial libraries/frameworks reveal the principal intentions/goals of a language/system creator(s)
The user(s) created libraries/frameworks gives you the true possibilities of a language/system.

[Steve Simpkin]

[Calculator] Keystroke RPN on a HP-25 in 1977, RPL on a HP-28C in 1988.

[Interpreter] Microsoft BASIC (1978) on an Ohio Scientific C1P in 1979.

[Assembler] 6502 on the above computer in 1980.

[Compiler] PL/M on an Intel 8096 in 1993.

[ DSP ] Assembly on various Analog Devices ADSP-21xx family devices in 1995.

[ FPGA ] AHDL on various Altera Flex 8000 series CPLD devices in 1995.

[Dwight Sturrock]

RPN keystroke on HP34C , 1983.
MS-BASIC starting about 1985.

[Dave Britten]

Probably a dash of BASIC on our Commodore 64 when I was about 6 or 7. I didn't really start getting into programming until Q-BASIC in my dad's Zenith SuperSport 286 laptop. I didn't really have any instructional books; I still remember the light in my head going on one afternoon when I realized that incrementing a score counter was a simple as 'P=P+1'.

Never did anything too fancy with Q-BASIC. I did a great deal of making variously horrible and humorous games in ZZT, which is essentially the 2D MS-DOS predecessor to Unreal Engine. I highly recommend checking it out, even today.

Appropriately enough, it was the TI-82 I got around age 13 where I really started to take off. I was frequently wrestling with the 24 KB user RAM area on that, and later on my TI-83, on account of writing so many games and other utilities.

[BobVA]

(07-04-2015 03:54 AM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  Chess in one line, why not!

Oh, for those not familiar with APL I should have pointed out...it was a pretty long line. :-)

[Sukiari]

Applesoft BASIC of course. Almost an entire generation of kids born in the USA around 1970-1980 or so knew to automatically enter this program any time a BASIC prompt was available on any computer in sight:

10 PRINT (or ? for you Apple-heads) "doodie"
20 GOTO 10

and then punch in RUN for some quick laughs.

I never did that much interesting stuff with BASIC (until recently!) and my first real programming was done with Pascal. I can't help but think how much better off we'd have been if Smalltalk-80 had made it as the default home computer GUI interface / API / environment / etc instead of the varying Mac, Windows, and Unix desktops. It was way too slow in those days though, at least on affordable hardware.

[Tugdual]

For a beginning I was not choosing the language, I was just lucky to approach a machine and then used what was available.

Computers
ZX81: Basic / Z80 assembly
Oric Atmos: Basic / 6502 assembly
Atari ST: C and 68000 assembly (best processor ever)

Finally started to work on PC.
- learned Pascal at school and was so frustrated I didn't know C++
- learned C++ and OO with Borland C++ then moved on MS MFC and now Qt

Calculators
TI57 > HP15C > HP Prime (basic meh) > Hp 50g uRPL (and deliberate decision to not learn sysRPL and/or assembly)

All the rest
The list is long but this basically what I started with and after all these years I came to the conclusion that the language is less important than the libraries. MFC was a pain and I didn't want to learn .NET which I found too cumbersome and too MS proprietary solution. At the moment I do a lot of coding on Qt and started recently QML which was surprisingly good after you understand how to structure an app.
I have no nostalgia for "good old time", nowadays solutions are better, thanks god.

[BruceH]

(07-03-2015 05:51 PM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  What was your first programming language?

First programming was on a Casio FX180P which has just 38 steps and only two program flow options: jump back to the beginning if x>0 or if X<=M. That definitely made you work hard to optimise.

First paid programming was using CBASIC on 8086-based PCs running Concurrent CP/M; and Cobol on various ICL mainframes, running VME.

[rprosperi]

(07-04-2015 04:24 PM)Sylvain Cote Wrote:  Here is a partial list of computer languages that I have learned and for most, used professionally ...
: Forth...

Forth? Really, wow! I've never met anyone that actually used Forth on a commercial product. Lot's of folks learned it and explored it, and although I'm certain it was used to make lots of embedded products, I've never read about any. Of course RPL is the most significant Forth derivative in our world, I'm curious to hear about others.

And BTW, that's a pretty amazing list of languages!! It helps explain why your English is so good.

[jjohnson873]

[Calculator] RPN -> HP-25, HP-41CX, HP-29C, etc.
[Mainframe-college] FORTRAN (yes, I used punch cards), BASIC
[Single Board Computer] Assembly Motorola 6809 & 6502
[Personal Computer] Assembly Z80 (I was ticked off that Tandy TRS80 Model III never had a battery backed-up, real-time clock onboard, so I designed one for the parallel port and wrote assembly code for the Z80 to execute and read my RTC board on boot up.)
[VAX] C & C++ for GPS system, Turbo Pascal

[Monte Dalrymple]

(07-03-2015 05:51 PM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  What was your first programming language?

Pretty sure it was RPN on a 9100A. In 1968 I was in junior high in the Math GATE program and learned to program the "$5000 electronic calculator" purchased for the program. I remember that the machine had a printer on the left side and a slot for our program cards on the right side, so I'm pretty sure it was the 9100A. I wrote a program to calculate and print out the square roots of the numbers 1 to 100. Unfortunately the high school GATE program didn't have a math option, so the next programming I did was FORTRAN on the CDC 6600 in the basement of Cory Hall at UC Berkeley, around 1975.

The latest program that I did, a couple of weeks ago, was in QBasic, to translate the .rom file for the 41C timer module into Verilog for loading into an FPGA block RAM.

But I still prefer assembly language: for the 41CL, Z80, 8051, AVR, etc.

[Sylvain Cote]

(07-04-2015 11:31 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Forth? Really, wow!

You probably have forgotten it, but the boot loader (Open Firmware) used in the PowerPC Macintosh was in Forth.

Also, the Forth Interest Group have a forth implemented product page.

Sylvain