What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(07-09-2015 07:36 AM)Les Bell Wrote:  Turbo Pascal subsequently introduced a number of extensions that solved some of the problems, but were contrary to the spirit of the language.

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Turbo Pascal was an incredible product and hugely influential in its time - a lot of popular applications were written in it, and still are, using derivatives like Delphi - but I've always been of the opinion that it shouldn't have been called "Pascal". Wirth himself moved on to Modula and especially Modula-2, which solved the problems with Pascal.

This begs the question: How many if us actually use a programming language that adheres to the "official" language definitions and that did not have a single extension to the official definition? And how many of us restrained ourselves from using those language extensions in our programs?

I don't think I have - every implantation of the languages that I have used (granted a very small subset) has some variation from the original definition - usually in the way of extensions to the language. And I gladly used those extensions.

I'm a Turbo Pascal fan. I have used it since CP/M days and still use it today. Of course I'm only programming for myself and have the liberty to play with whatever I want to - no need for anyone else to see or use my poor attempt at programming.

And they did change the name - It wasn't called Pascal, It was called 'Turbo' Pascal which implied Pascal on steroids. The extensions did no harm to the original Pascal intent as defined by Wirth, but made Pascal much more popular than Wirth could have ever imagined. The result was a lot of programmers that used Turbo Pascal and then moved on to other languages.

I'd be willing to bet that in the early days of the PC, Turbo Pascal, with it's relatively cheap purchase price, integrated editing/compiling environment, probably did more to creating hobbyist programmers than did almost anything else you could name. Many of these hobbyist programmers went on to become professional programmers using many of the later languages.

Turbo Pascal also influenced many of the other languages that were available at the time. As a result of it's low price, we saw other languages reducing their price. All of a sudden, programming was affordable to the average PC hobbyist. I know that I couldn't afford a $400-500 compiler, but WOW - I could afford a $50 Turbo Pascal compiler. And it was a compiler not an interpreter. What a step up from the Basic interpreter that came with my PC. And boy was it fast.

I could say "I hate C/C+" etc. Who cares? I like eggs and bacon. Someone here will tell me he hates eggs and bacon. Again who cares?

We all use whatever language we like and that is great. What I would really hate was if there was only one language and we were all forced to use it.

Bill
Smithville, NJ