What programming language did you start with?

[SolarFlare]

Due to popular demand...

What programming language did you first learn? This was a gateway from the beginning of your programming life into who you currently are as a programmer. If you are still learning your first language, mention it anyway!

As for me, I first learned using True Basic Bronze. I really liked it even though it had fundamental flaws and limitations. I made some neat programs with it before I switched to C++ (I never learned C) and now I usually program in either C++ or use Microsoft Visual Studio.

[gjs368]

Hey! I get to vote first!!

My first programming experience was with Basic on an Ollivetti M1 computer that had 64k RAM and a HUGE 5mb HDD.

I learned to program on this machine because there weren't too many programs on it - or available for it - for me to play with.

The OS was PCOS, and windowing was integrated into the OS core :cool: :D

[Yves M]

I first started with BBCBasic on a BBC computer. That's actually how I started learning english, since the programmer's manual was only available in English ;)

Then some tries with a ROM for Pascal, but it proved just too darn difficult to make the thing actually run. When my dad got his first PC, I started to use Turbo Pascal and grew to like it. I stayed with that until University when C/C++/Java/Prolog/Miranda/Turing/perl had to be learned. Since then I programmed mostly in C/C++ with a hint of VB from time to time and some Haskell for helping friends out at university :p

[Andreas Masur]

I actually started my programming experience with one of the famous computers....a VC20 from Commodore. For those who do not know it - it was a kind of small C64 with less ROM and RAM etc.

Nevertheless I tweaked a little bit around (I will never forget the nice 'PEEK' command... :)). After several other commodore computers I ended up with the AMIGA. I did some BASIC stuff on it (actually we even programmed a nice SimCity-like game and sold it...:cool: ) before I came to the world of the PCs and of course Visual Basic/C/C++ and so on...

Nowadays I still stick with these...and of course I have still several AMIGA at home which I often use for a good old game...it is still one of the nicest computers ever made...

[s. roelants]

i started out with MSX-Basic somewhere around 83 i think, after a while i was convinced it wasn't powerfull enough so i switched to Machine Language on that beast (Z80).

Somewhere around the same time we got our first XT so i started doing some Basic on that, and some ML after a while i found out there where things like assemblers :D
During the rest of my secundary education i kind of kept busy with Turbo pascal

In university i had stuff like fortran and pascal in one , and modula2 prolog in the other uni, complemented with c and c++ on unix machines in the higher years. At home i tended to use Borland C++ with OWL back then, with which i actually started my profesional carreer.

Then i switched to VC++ and MFC mostly because of the market demand :D, and kind of stuck with it.
In between did some forth, forte and of course the inevitable VB and Java and their respective scripting variants.

That must about it i guess apart from the occasional brushes with some more exotic languages like Ada and what have you :D

lol , hmmm, that's my programming history :D :D :D

[John E]

BBC Basic for me, while also studying Fortran and Cobol at college. Left programming for a LONG while after landing a cushy job with a major TV broadcaster, then went to work in product design for a software company before becoming besotted by Borland's "Turbo C". Now using Visual C++ after some bad experiences with Borland (the company, not the product).

[SolarFlare]

Maybe the poll should have further divided the "basic" catergory! It seems like everybody has chosen it... except for one person.

[galathaea]

I've posted elsewhere about my early relationship with the turtle, so I won't recapitulate. Just wan't to agree with Andreas about the Amiga's. The whole Commodore line was a great place to learn programming. I had a C128, but my friend had a Vic and later an Amiga. From BASIC, to assembly, display, and disk drive internals, it was really the Commodore line that gave me most of the basics of programming.

So maybe a new thread yet? Which computer system was most instrumental to your programming learning? This is pretty closely coupled to OS, and not just processor.... But I think it might be best to just merge these discussions under the general category of learning paths...

[aio]

I dont know what Basic was that, but that was built-in (I think) with Texas Instruments' TRS 80. But the first real program (the one that earned money for me), was with QBasic.

[Waldo2k2]

Perl,
hated EVERY minute of it.
Abandoned it and moved on.

[Yves M]

By the way, it's normal that most people started off with some form of Basic. Many operating systems came with Basic and well, it stands for "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code", so it's for beginners. ;)

Perl,
hated EVERY minute of it.

When I drew the list up, I didn't think that anybody actually started with perl :p

[WayneS]

I started with Fortran/Cobol on a mainframe. Got a Radio Shack Model TRS80 and learned basic and assembly. When C came out I tried it but didn't like it. Went to Borland Basic because it could be compiled. Then Visual Basic 1.0, 3.0 & 6.0. Also got Borland C++ 4.0. I do most of my programing in VB however.

[aio]

Originally posted by Yves M
By the way, it's normal that most people started off with some form of Basic. Many operating systems came with Basic and well, it stands for "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code", so it's for beginners.

.. and until now, I'm still a beginner because I only program in this "Beginner..." thing. :p


Originally posted by WayneS
I started with Fortran/Cobol on a mainframe. Got a Radio Shack Model TRS80 and learned basic and assembly. When C came out I tried it but didn't like it. Went to Borland Basic because it could be compiled. Then Visual Basic 1.0, 3.0 & 6.0. Also got Borland C++ 4.0. I do most of my programing in VB however.

I think, that was the one I started with. If I can recall it right, we used a TV as the monitor, and the storage media looks like a casette tape. I can't recall (or figure out) where the processor is --seems to me, it was incorporated with the keyboard, that's why keyboard looks like a xylophone case and keys looks like that of the calculator.

Did I recall it right WayneS?

[WayneS]

That's correct aio programs and data stored on a casette tape.

[SolarFlare]

Originally posted by Yves M
By the way, it's normal that most people started off with some form of Basic. Many operating systems came with Basic and well, it stands for "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code", so it's for beginners. ;)
The basic I learned didn't do that at all! I feel so deprived now! ;) It was so unrelated to C++ that I had to learn it from scratch. The syntax, variables, style, program flow, etc. were all entirely unrelated between the two languages.

[Elrond]

I started doing soem programming on my pocket calculator, but the first real programming was during my studies using Pascal. I've never used this language since then. I've learned other languages during my studies, but I'm not using most of them (C, prolog, ADA, Cobol).

My first professionnal programming experience was using VBA, shortly followed by a mix of VB and VC++.

Now it's almost only VC++.

[Goodz13]

My Eveloution went like this.

QBasic, VB, C, C++, Java, TMU Basic.

My language of choice is Java, but I've been on Working with a guy for a while now on Theos with TMU Basic and C creating Reservation Systems on terminals.

[Gabriel Fleseriu]

I wrote my first program in Basic on a C128. After a while I got a PC and programmed in Pascal for fun. Later I switched to C/C++ and Assembler.

[dimm_coder]

I started with Pascal.
Also I learned at University: Fortran/ASM/Prolog/C++/Java.
But I have been using C++ mostly at work and for other demands at University.

[Pug]

From my freshman year at college ('94), we started with C++. I had some fun with programming in Basic on my parents' IBM PC XT when I was younger, but that was just typing programs in from books (usually buggy programs if I remember correctly). My first real efforts at programming were done in C++.

[SolarFlare]

Who voted for other?

[JamesSchumacher]

2 1/2 years ago, with IMHO best language there is - C++.

Up until that time, the only computer I had was an old Tandy 1000 running DOS, the type you had to install Basic on to run *.BAS files.

We got a computer with Win98 on it, I played a game called Baldur's Gate, saw some editors for it written in VB, and said - WOW, I wish I could do that.

I ran out to the store, bought VC++ intro edition, and Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 days (not VC++, glad I didn't. :p )

And now, C++ is my weapon of choice. :D Although, assembly in bits has really saved some time (some algorithms are best suited for assembly - even C++ no matter how you look at them, will run slow, they're too complicated.)

[SolarFlare]

Originally posted by JamesSchumacher
I ran out to the store, bought VC++ intro edition, and Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 days (not VC++, glad I didn't. :p )

I actually have the Sams Teach Yourself Visual C++ in 21 Days book and I really don't like it. The author just seems so darnn arrogant all the time. And doesn't explain why he does things: it's just like, "Enter this code in this spot... and voila... you did nothing useful".

[JamesSchumacher]

Originally posted by solarflare

I actually have the Sams Teach Yourself Visual C++ in 21 Days book and I really don't like it. The author just seems so darnn arrogant all the time. And doesn't explain why he does things: it's just like, "Enter this code in this spot... and voila... you did nothing useful".

I eventually saw that book - egads - it does nothing useful for teaching you C++, heck - it doesn't even do a good job of teaching you MFC. :rolleyes:

Which didn't bother me at all, I'm a pure Win32 API coder anyway when it comes to Windows. (Translation - my own C++ classes, not straight Win32. My own classes that wrap Win32, excuse me. Although, it's not a whole library like MFC, I only wrap any of it when I have to - there are alot of parts of the Win32 API I haven't used yet, so I haven't wrote a class for yet.)

[Gabriel Fleseriu]

Originally posted by JamesSchumacher
2 1/2 years ago, with IMHO best language there is - C++

I think there is no programming language that can be considered being "the best". In my oppinion, selecting a programming language for a specific project is rarely done on pure technical aspects like the power and flexibility of the language, but rather considering aspects like developement time, maintanance, availability of tools and qualified personell, tradition of the company and so on.

On the other hand, all of us tend to develop a sympathy for one programming language or the other and to favor it upon other programming languages. My personal favorite is C++. However, I have found that Visual Basic is a far better choice for some tasks, because it dramatically reduces the developement time.

I think it was Bjarne Stroustrup who gave a very decent argumentation why comparing programming languages in an ojective way is a very difficult task, even from the technical point of view.

[Waldo2k2]

selecting a programming language for a specific project is rarely done on pure technical aspects like the power and flexibility of the language

actually this is usually the only way i choose how to program something. I recently chose to use Ada for a project simply because of how precisely it handles memory.

[Platinum Plus]

QBasic :)

Waiting for QBasic ++ :(

[irona20]

Pascal & Ada

But Ada is forgotten for me :)

[Yves M]

Does that mean you still use Pascal ? ;)

[irona20]

:D :p
That means I can write some code lines in Pascal right now :)

[Simon666]

I learned Pascal first at the university now almost 6 years ago. It is unbelievable that they allow a professor to keep teaching that. It was said he didn't give C because he didn't know about it. If you teach an entire generation of engineers, you should have the decency and responsibility to teach something that is actually widely used (VC,VB,Java) or has the future and will teach you something for when you graduate.

[Yves M]

Well, Simon, the important thing about learning a first language is most of the time to get the general ideas about programming. What are variables, functions, conditionals etc.

But it's true that you might just as well learn to program in a language that is used ;)

At University we started off by learning Object Oriented Turing. That's a real teaching language and there are probably not many people writing real programs in it. But the point was to learn about programming in general.

Then we learned C in a crash-course over 1 week in the second year. If I hadn't had a clue about C in the first place, I would not have gotten much from those classes :p The teaching assistant who held those classes didn't explain stuff properly and at one point one of the students actually went to explain pointers in a much easier way than he did. But well, we were supposed to know about programming, so it was only getting used to a different syntax and the concept of pointers.

[Doctor Luz]

I don't know if non-Visual BASIC means the old "Beginers All-purpose Symbolic Instructions Code", the interpretated programming language (with its goto, gosub, print, input... )
. If yes, then, I started with BASIC. More exactly with GWBasic in an old 8088 with monochrome display.

Very funny but horrible when readitg the structure of a .bas because always were filled with goto's and gosub's.

It's curious that goto statement has been inherited by other programming languages. It's a classical the article by Esdger W. Dijkstra "GOTO statement considered harmful" published in the ACM magazine in may 1968.

Nowadays I have fogotten the most of the knowledge I had about this language.

[Yves M]

Hehe, search the non-visual C++ forum for a recent discussion about the usage of goto... It's interesting :D I attended a conference of Dijkstra and so as an impressionable youth, I haven't used a goto since ;)

[OK I admit that I have to use On Error Goto when I program in Visual Basic ;) ]

[WayneS]

Basic was used to teach programing. It used words that were common to everyone so the instructor did not have to waste a lot of time teaching a "programing language". No one knew at that time what basic would turn into.
I don't think the "Beginers All-purpose Symbolic Instructions Code" holds anymore.

[phil edney]

Progress as follows

Spectrum Basic-> BBC Basic-> Fortran 7-> AutoLisp-> Modula2-> VB(2/3)-> C-> MDL-> VB(4/5 this time)-> Pro C-> VB(6) & C++ & various 4GL DB languages.

ahh memories of AutoLisp, all that (setq pt3 (list (car pt2) (cadr pt2) ht)) (setq ht1(- t(+ (* ovh (/ sl 12.0))(* w (/ sl 12.0))))) stuff....

Might even make it to VB.Net....one day

[bubu]

VB(6) for ever!