What Was Your First Programming Language?

[toml_12953]

Mine was FORTRAN. I don't know what kind of computer it ran on since we never saw the machine. We typed up decks of punched cards and turned them in to the data center. In two or three (usually three) days, we'd get our deck back wrapped in a printout of the program run. If the printout was slim, there was a good chance it worked. If it was a huge, thick listing, we'd cringe before even opening it. It was usually a dreaded ABEND (ABnormal END) core dump and we'd have to debug our program and resubmit it. Sometimes if the program was complex it could take a couple weeks to get a good compile and run.