What Was Your First Programming Language?

[DavidM]

First: PL/I on IBM 360 in the keypunch era. We only had to wait a few hours most of the time for results, though. So I guess I was lucky in that regard.

I was fortunate to have been in the first group of people at my university to be able to switch to the "new" terminal system which allowed results to be obtained within a few minutes (usually). It was around that time that they also shifted the primary "high level" teaching language to Pascal. Some amount of IBM 360 Assembly, Fortran, Cobol, and various JCL and scripting languages were added as time passed.

It was also during that time that I upgraded from a 33C to a 41C, and thought I had entered a new realm when someone showed me how to use the byte-grabber to enter some synthetics. Yes, I kept one of those laminated byte-code charts with my 41.

Most of my coding over the years has probably been in Pascal (using MPW while at Apple and Delphi after that). Lately it's mostly RPL (majority SysRPL but also some User) and Saturn assembly.