What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Joe Horn]

(07-07-2015 02:26 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  What are some of the other obscure Programming Languages?

My favorite arcana:
- OPL, on my much-loved Psion 3a, until it (and tis replacement) died.
- UBASIC, a nifty version of BASIC with adjustable precision & accuracy, apparently from Japan. I still use it (runs fine in Windows 7).
- "True BASIC", on the Amiga. First language that I taught.

My *first* programming language, however, was the version of BASIC that came with the time-sharing Data General "Nova 2" computer at college. To make a long story short, I crashed the entire system (losing everything that all the people at all the terminals were doing, campus-wide) by typing the two characters ";<". I left my now-dead terminal in the library, walked across campus to the computer lab, and as soon as I walked in, Karen Dodson (the lab tech) said, "Joe, were you just in the library?" It turns out that as soon as the front panel had stopped blinking, she knew that I was to blame (I always was), and she was just waiting for me to walk in. Hey, don't blame me, all I did was type semicolon less than!