What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

(07-03-2015 09:27 PM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  

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

Another tangent. Obscure programming languages.

Being from Southern California I'm partial to VALGOL, but I find Whitespace interesting, too. Methods of writing unmaintainable code is quite fun to read.

Dave

For obscure how about APL, I do have a complete APL system for PC and dabbled with it a little. It can be used to write some wonderfully obscure code, in fact there used to be a regular obfuscated code competition to write the most complex single line of APL code. For those not familiar with Ken Iverson's baby it uses a set of single character symbols instead of key words and it is possible to cram a great deal of code into a single line.

During the approximately 4 years before my escape from professional programming, I was granted to opportunity to maintain code that was written by others, and I believe the quote attributed to Napoleon at the top of the recommended reading above to be most often the cause of the awful code I had dumped on me. I have little formal programming training but I do know awful code when I see it, and my short experience with professional programming strengthened the notion that skill does not necessarily follow education.