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macOS What was you first programming language?

What was your first programming language?

  • BASIC

    Votes: 63 47.0%

  • C (or C++)

    Votes: 27 20.1%

  • COBOL

    Votes: 2 1.5%

  • FORTRAN

    Votes: 15 11.2%

  • Logo

    Votes: 3 2.2%

  • Objective-C

    Votes: 4 3.0%

  • Pascal

    Votes: 7 5.2%

  • Perl

    Votes: 1 0.7%

  • Python

    Votes: 3 2.2%

  • Java

    Votes: 8 6.0%

  • C#

    Votes: 1 0.7%
  • Total voters
    134
  • Poll closed .
chown33 said:
When I started programming, we didn't even have programming languages. We had to train small animals like hedgehogs and muskrats to perform the operations. Some things were obvious: rabbits or mice (multipliers), certain species of snakes (adders), and the occasional repurposed flotsam (oar gates). But let me tell you, it takes a lot of training to consistently complement a hedgehog.

Then we'd line everything up along the road and run them through their paces in a kind of "relay race". It was much later that electromechanical relays were invented, but by then the term "relay computer" was already long established.
Click to expand...

Maaaaaan, you're old 😱

My first was Applesoft BASIC on an Apple ][. I believe my first program was something along the lines of:

10 PRINT "I CAN BEEP!"
20 PRINT CHR$(7)
30 GOTO 10

I ran it with great pride. Then my grade 4 computer teacher came by, thoroughly unimpressed, and said "Yes, dear, you can. Now turn it off."

She didn't recognize (potential) (future) greatness when she saw it. 🙁
 
notjustjay said:
I believe my first program was something along the lines of:

10 PRINT "I CAN BEEP!"
20 PRINT CHR$(7)
30 GOTO 10

I ran it with great pride.
Click to expand...
This bad boy let me print out Christmas Trees from 6502 Assembler.
They were AWESOME!

The computer also came with a 2 kilobyte BASIC in ROM, so was I ready for it when floppy drives made writing and storing large, high level programs practical at home.
 
Sinclair Basic on the ZX81
A bit of Pascal during my work training program (YTS for those that lived in the UK during the 80's!)
Did a bit of C, got stuck

As for scripting I dabbled in HTML, Javascript and PHP.

Crap at all of them to be honest, though free script sites* help with the latter selection!


*I always credit where I get the code from, even if it's been through a bit of a re-write (though the credit on PHP ain't going to be seen by anyone!)
 
wgnoyes said:
My first was the interpreter language built into a HP67 programmable calculator.
Click to expand...

Was that the one with the lettered keys across the top? The one that used magnetic card storage, with templates on the cards? I always thought those we so cool.
 
BASIC on the HP-85, Apple ][ and PDP-11. Pascal soon thereafter and some 6502 Assembly code.

B
 
interrobang said:
Where is the HyperTalk option?
Click to expand...

In the same (statistical) bin as AppleScript. 😛 I do jest, it's just another one of many that could have been on the list.

I'm interested by the fact that Perl and Python have no votes, so far.
 
Fortran. On PUNCH CARDS no less. Our high school didn't even have a punch so we marked the blocks with a sharpie and the cards were read by some kind of optical reader. We got to run programs ONCE A WEEK. We were bussed to a central computer lab and got to run the program maybe 3-4 times. Typos were a b*tch.

My Apple ][ was quite a step up a few years later.
 
Scott6666 said:
Fortran. On PUNCH CARDS no less. Our high school didn't even have a punch so we marked the blocks with a sharpie and the cards were read by some kind of optical reader. We got to run programs ONCE A WEEK. We were bussed to a central computer lab and got to run the program maybe 3-4 times. Typos were a b*tch.

My Apple ][ was quite a step up a few years later.
Click to expand...

I bet it made you a very careful coder, and it made you understand what your program was going to do. None of this "I don't know why it works, I just kept trying things until it did" for you.
 
Scott6666 said:
Fortran. On PUNCH CARDS no less. Our high school didn't even have a punch so we marked the blocks with a sharpie and the cards were read by some kind of optical reader. We got to run programs ONCE A WEEK. We were bussed to a central computer lab and got to run the program maybe 3-4 times. Typos were a b*tch.

My Apple ][ was quite a step up a few years later.
Click to expand...

jiminaus said:
I bet it made you a very careful coder, and it made you understand what your program was going to do. None of this "I don't know why it works, I just kept trying things until it did" for you.
Click to expand...

- and also a very economical coder too. When you've only got relatively few bytes to play with, and/or extremely slow loading times (remember the Commodore PETs with the C-15 cassette drives?), it did tend to focus the mind on lean and efficient code.

EDIT: actually may have been another "PC" with the cassette drive. but you know what I mean.
 
I first learnt java in my 1st year of my computer science degree
then did VBA for a year on placement 😛
 
jiminaus said:
In the same (statistical) bin as AppleScript. 😛 I do jest, it's just another one of many that could have been on the list.

I'm interested by the fact that Perl and Python have no votes, so far.
Click to expand...

If you were going to target it at young people learning programming today, I'd have included JavaScript and PHP. Today's n00b programmers want to make the interwebs, and those are the languages they'd get pointed to.
 
Java, C++, VB.net, C#, Objective C.

Though I did play with K&R C and python before actually getting a handle on programing with Java.
 
What language would you say the TI calculators are programmed in?

I feel like, for many of the people who went to my high school, that was their first programming language. It was taught as part of our Algebra II courses.

Although, I personally self taught C while I was taking Algebra, so C was my first language, followed by Obj-C (also self taught), and then I learned the TI programming in Algebra II, and in my college engineering classes I'm being taught C++. Which is good, because it means I can now participate in TopCoder.
 
In the UK back in the 80s, we had a rather wonderful language called CESIL, (Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language)
It was a low-level language specially designed to teach kids on the basics of assembly language.

The instruction set was incredibly small, and consisted of LOAD, STORE, ADD, SUBTRACT and so on. The programs we wrote were completely pointless a lot of the time, but it gave us all a sound grounding in Assembler, and we went on to develop code for 6502/6510, Z80 and 68000 etc.

I read somewhere recently that this sort of "under the bonnet" approach is no longer taught in UK schools, which is a great shame, as it gave us all a sound grounding in low-level programming and an insight into the building blocks that all software is based on, even today.
 
chown33 said:
When I started programming, we didn't even have programming languages. We had to train small animals like hedgehogs and muskrats to perform the operations. Some things were obvious: rabbits or mice (multipliers), certain species of snakes (adders), and the occasional repurposed flotsam (oar gates). But let me tell you, it takes a lot of training to consistently complement a hedgehog.

Then we'd line everything up along the road and run them through their paces in a kind of "relay race". It was much later that electromechanical relays were invented, but by then the term "relay computer" was already long established.
Click to expand...

Here's a real programmer from our day chown! LOL

Took 8 months to teach the chubby one to yell row... Strange, it's such a simple word.

http://youtu.be/VU6hmgTY76M

Commodore Pet Basic
Assembler on my TI99/4A
Pascal
Vax Assembler
C

Pretty wild to think all were self taught, they didn't teach languages in school. C wasn't even a standard yet. Punch Cards suck, Teletype terminal were badass tree killers and sorting required jumper wires on these 15 foot long sort machines.
 
Last edited:
C (took a college programming class when I was a junior in high school)

Then C++, x86 assembly, motorola HC11 assembly, Perl, Java, php, Fortran 77, Fortran 90, LISP, Python, Objective C
 
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