What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Garth Wilson]

(07-07-2015 04:25 AM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  

(07-07-2015 01:31 AM)Paul Berger (Canada) Wrote:  Yes Charles Moore created it to run radio telescopes. It was supposed to be named "Fourth" for fourth generation software but the IBM 1130 he was using only accepted 5 character file names, so says the forward Moore wrote for Leo Brodie's "Starting FORTH" which is one of the best books for learning Forth.

I learned Forth from reading Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ). DDJ was incredibly geeky but they published full program listings and long articles and you could learn a lot from reading it.

I had a friend with an HP-71 and the Forth/Assembler module, and he programmed in Forth on that and got me interested. So about 1990, I bought the module and Brodie's book Starting Forth and dove in. It was not the easiest, because Starting Forth assumed you had something to practice on, and the manual that came with the module assumed you already knew Forth and just needed to know the peculiarities of this version that uses 5-nybble cells, a RAM file system, etc.. I suppose it didn't help that the Forth in the module was a very poor version; but since it was Forth and you can get under the hood, I was able to improve it a lot. Some of the words in it must have called routines in the mainframe, with a ton of overhead, because they were super slow. I was able to speed a lot of them up by re-writing them, even in Forth, not even as primitives. The extreme case was that I was able to make CHR$ IIRC 13 times as fast.