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What Was Your First Programming Language?
12-02-2017, 07:18 PM (This post was last modified: 12-02-2017 08:06 PM by pier4r.)
Post: #118
RE: What Was Your First Programming Language?
(07-03-2015 05:51 PM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  Inspired by "did anyone ever program in RPG?".

Nice link as well. I should read this section (not HP calc) as I did with the general forum.
I contribute and then I read the entire thread (so updates may come).

Anyway some history.

Around I was 10-12 (1990') : Turbo Pascal (7.0) . I was introduced to pascal by some books in the library of my grandmother (the family had a lot of books there) and then in high school we had Pascal as well. Barely touched but there was a manual.

I used Pascal mostly for little math problems (as today I would use the 50g and RPL). I remember my first serious program was to solve some cases of a quadratic equation.

I can also say that, thanks to this very recollection, the environment in which one grows is important. Surely personal curiosity helps, but having peers or other people doing similar steps helps more to continue one experiences in a topic. Indeed I had very few stimuli aside from the little math problems.

In Pascal I never really used much more than arrays, single variables. No records or objects.
I had a briefly introduction to Delphi, but I did not followed it because I couldn't purchase it.
I was Pascal only for many years, and I even followed a magazine about end user computers, but there was not much programming there. Sure with hindsight is easy to say that those were poor choices.

Then in the University (late 2000) I was introduced to Java (started with Java 1.4 IIRC). Nice thing, liked OOP , concurrency and other stuff.

Alone I did a bit of Vbscript, javascript(node.js)/jscript. Then was the turn of scilab, of which I liked a lot since, well, math environment that do not require extensive search of libraries and testing (is the library I downloaded good for me?) are always nice. Although scilab was really slow sometimes (scilab 5.x or something).

Then I bought to myself the hp 50g. So userRPL (I never went past userRPL, although I know that C is possible)

Then thanks to the nokia e5 I dived a bit more in python. (python s60)
Then VBA (excel), realbasic , freepascal (here I used for the first time records and pointers), C++ (with an emule mod), assembly, prolog , sql, autoit (with Xpadder is great) .

Later at work (system administration. Sometimes I wonder why I did not picked a programming first job) more sql, awk, more bash, powershell, some php, some java, plpgsql (interesting thing), javascript (highcharts.com is a neat replacement of office or gnuplot), some perl, puppet.

I still miss - damn me - a serious dive in a functional language. I'd say Ocaml or Lisp because why not, and on the other side I's like to seriously start with HPPL.
For this I blame the 50g, with its RPL that does the job too much times and the availability of commands or functions for mostly everything I care to solve. It is fricking impressive.

Also won't be bad to know a basic implementation (not VB.net that is windows only) that has also quite some math libraries, at the level of a scientific calculator at least.

On puppet one may say "but it is not really programming". Indeed they have a funny view of variables, that until puppet 5.2 are more constant than variables, but it is nonetheless a variant of declarative programming. One may achieve somehow even loops (spamming new resources though).

I also think that some advanced usage of markup languages is not different than declarative programming, where one feeds "how the solution should look like" to an engine that understand and act to produce a result.

edit1: the best introduction to OOP read by me so far is the one explained in the manual (free, online) of turbo pascal 5.5 .


edit2: some nice links in the thread. A site had a warning of "hacked page", so I found this: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code

edit3: read the thread. Really nice. Anyway while I know that python is really powerful, the forced indentation stile and the absence of curly braces that for me help to clearly define a block do not let me like it.

Because sometimes I do like:

Code:

code


#comment
other code


code

Therefore isolating some code parts (if I don't want to put them in to functions) that are a bit subtle with comments around. In python I am not sure it works well if I don't keep the indentation of the empty lines.

Wikis are great, Contribute :)
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RE: What Was Your First Programming Language? - pier4r - 12-02-2017 07:18 PM



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