Poll: What was the first programming language you learned?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169124

by solipsist • 15 years ago

16 66 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

kang• 15 years ago

COBOL

solipsist4• 15 years ago

Thanks, I've now added that to the list.

bjg• 15 years ago

My condolences.

But seriously, I am grateful for all the awesome hackers that came before and continue with me. My tools and languages are far superior now than when I started.

andrewjshults2• 15 years ago

Not sure how BASIC didn't make this list. Played around with it first on an old tandy my dad had and then got actually interested when I started learning ti-basic for the ti-86. First "modern" language was PHP, although I don't know if you can really count PHP3 as modern.

solipsist4• 15 years ago

My bad. I'm from a younger generation so I'm pretty uneducated when it comes to some of the earlier programming languages.

andrewjshults2• 15 years ago

Just for curiosity sake, what is now the younger generation (I'm 23 and hadn't quite realized I've already left the younger generation).

pvg• 15 years ago

There's probably quite a few people who started out during the 8-bit micro era who will have some variant of BASIC or BASIC + assembly as a 'first language'. Pascal was widely used in higher education during roughly the same period.

ruslan• 15 years ago

Ah.. MASM, AFD, Peter Norton's PC Programmer's Bible... anybody remembers how that first hyper-link based helpfile was called with all the INTs and stuff ?

Although I studied programming (I was 13) one of those Soviet IBM System/360 clones in FORTRAN I did not like it. I was pretty much fascinated with Ataris which started to popup in USSR in late 80th, so I learnt 6502 assembly soon after I put my hands on one of 130XE. When IBM PCs came in I learnt x86 asm, then C and C++, but much much later :-)

austinchang• 15 years ago

Learning simple logic gates in LOGO making the turtle go around a path... do kids still do that today or is it much fancier?

cperciva• 15 years ago

LOGO! It's not a bad first language for a 5 year old.

rflrob• 15 years ago

I remember figuring out how to make a turtle graphics sailboat, faking the curved surfaces by stepping a bit then turning a bit.

catshirt2• 15 years ago

seems strange to put php with javascript, html, and css, while giving ruby and python their own options.

buckwild• 15 years ago

I didn't have the luxury of ruby or python when I learned to program HTML--this was sometime in 1997/1998. I had cgi and perl, although I didn't use them too much.

solipsist4• 15 years ago

Yeah, it was probably a bad decision. But I chose to go strictly by definition, and PHP is a "a widely-used general-purpose scripting language" (http://www.php.net/).

Javascript, HTML, and CSS are obviously very different from PHP, but they are all scripting languages.

catshirt2• 15 years ago

i think you are mistaken. generally speaking, python and ruby are considered scripting languages. html and css are not.

Xk• 15 years ago

There's no Lisp/Scheme option. This wasn't my first, but I know many who learned Scheme from SCIP as their first language.

askhader• 15 years ago

I agree, there ought to be a lisp option.

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

BASIC, on a MicroBee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee

A beaut little machine for its time. Oh the hours lost to playing space invaders ...

rrrhys• 15 years ago

Visual Basic :|

rcavezza• 15 years ago

Same here. 9th Grade Computer Programming. :-)

reynolds• 15 years ago

I started with HyperCard as a kid. My parents got me a couple Java books but I never got into it. My first real programming experience was with Python when I was in high school. My dad told me that no one uses Python and that I should learn C++, so that's what I did. That was over 10 years ago so things have changed a bit with regard to Python :)

These days my favorites are C, Python, and Scheme.

akx• 15 years ago

Qbasic on a 286.

elliottcarlson• 15 years ago

Same here, though on an 8086

damien75795• 15 years ago

Snap... then moved to QuickBasic..ooooooooowwww. Remember the bundles source for gorillas,money and nibbles?

kevin_morrill• 15 years ago

Nibbles was the good stuff. Those were some great times playing around in QBasic. Totally sold me on how amazing programming was.

MikeMakesIt• 15 years ago

Exactly the same.

webspiderus• 15 years ago

C# (and the rest of the .NET paradigm along with it). once i got the taste of command-line + gcc in my first Computer Science courses, I never really looked back ..

robyn-rabbit• 15 years ago

My introduction to programming was with Applesoft BASIC on an Apple IIE in 7th grade.

Frocer• 15 years ago

Aw, no Pascal?

zdw• 15 years ago

MacPascal here... weirdest code syntax highlighting ever.

stanmancan• 15 years ago

As I said in the other thread... Visual Basic 6 when I was 14... I literally had to stop programming for about 3 years before I could start "fresh" again.

msbarnett• 15 years ago

Pascal. With Just Enough Pascal, way back when Symantec was mainly known for making compilers.

jfmiller28• 15 years ago

BASIC on the TRS-80. I was 8.

noob007• 15 years ago

uhhh...rapidq

gabbo• 15 years ago

Beyond DOS/Windows batch files which are terrible but indeed a language, my first "real" language was Turing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language) ). It was mainly used in Canadian high schools - at least it was when I was there at the beginning of the decade.

I didn't like it but it had a full graphical environment that was pretty accessible to students. I liked that our particular IDE/interpreter was called WinOOT (Windows Object Oriented Turing) - OOT pronounced like the stereotypical Canadian pronunciation of about, "aboot". If that's not patriotic enough, it also had a built-in graphics function named drawmapleleaf.

Yaggo• 15 years ago

Since when HTML and CSS have been programming languages? Why is javascript (a real, turing complete language) bundled with them?

h3rald• 15 years ago

Pascal

bitserf• 15 years ago

BASIC on a SpectraVideo SV-328 (CP/M).

I didn't have storage for a while, so initially I had to type in my games every time before playing them.

Then I got a tape drive and spent months playing Tetra Horror :)

http://www.generation-msx.nl/msxdb/softwareinfo/227

damien75795• 15 years ago

Where's Assembler in the list :) I loved me some MASM. Did no one learn this in the late 80's early 90's? It must still be used a lot for embedded systems ...

What I liked about it was a) it was hard and made you really really think about what you where doing (in terms of memory and CPU usage) as you where in total control of both at all times and there was often no abstraction (well unless you wrote in binary I suppose). b) it was super tedious and required keeping a lot of code in your head at one time so when moving to say C/C++ it made you review your code with some sympathy of how it will run and how to optimise it (say rolled and unrolled loops etc). When things went wrong in C you could look at the produced ASM and understand perhaps why.

Do I miss it? Heeeeeellll no!

dazzawazza• 15 years ago

oh the memories! I just voted for BASIC (having self learned BBC Basic using school computers after school). Your post reminded me that I actually first started to learn to program asm on an ORIC 16k.

damien75795• 15 years ago

Yes, I voted for BASIC too but ASM was what I first messed around in on an Amstrad 512k using the manual that it came with. Remember when manuals had pin outs of all the ports and sometimes circuit digrams and included a reference manual of the CPU instruction set and sample programs?? Oh those where the days =)

bryanlarsen• 15 years ago

I would also have voted for assembler if it was on the list, since that's actually the first language I ever used. (On a Magnavox Oddessey 2 game console, no less). I did choose BASIC, because that's the first language that I first successfully used. :)

kevinstubbs• 15 years ago

ActionScript <3. ActionScript 2 to 3, C#, C++ and then most recently JS/HTML, PHP and mySQL. What a strange path.

kbob• 15 years ago

I bet I'm the only person here who can answer Teco. I found a PDP-11 at college and Teco was what it had, so it's what I started playing with.

jjordan• 15 years ago

TI-86 Basic! Turns out ticalc.org is still hosting games I uploaded in the late 90's, impressive.

kenneth_reitz• 15 years ago

GW-BASIC!

limmeau• 15 years ago

dBase... Well, it was on the computer dad brought home from work.

julianz2• 15 years ago

Yeah my first paid job was in dBase II on CP/M, aged 12.

Skywing• 15 years ago

I chose scripting language, because I was introduced to programming with mIRC script. :) I actually used mIRC script to write socket-based tools that didn't even run on IRC. I wrote Battle.net bots with it, if anyone recalls those days. This was in like 1997.

noblethrasher• 15 years ago

The first language that I "learned" was BASIC but the first language that taught me how to program was JavaScript (especially when 'JavaScript is a Lisp' was a popular meme).

krisrak• 15 years ago

Thats awesome that so many people along with me started with BASIC, I'm guess a lot of people in HN community are between 28-33 years old now

damien75795• 15 years ago

Yeah probably. Seems it was mostly BASIC + asm for that age range. Rock on GWBasic! It's probably where you learnt to use your first GOTO like a billion times :)

allanp8• 15 years ago

BASIC (CPC-6128, then TI-83+).

wlievens• 15 years ago

Scheme is not in this list?

michaelcampbell• 15 years ago

I presume your "dot net" entry encompasses any .NET language, other than C# which is already accounted for?

jam• 15 years ago

matlab

bradleyland• 15 years ago

I feel like the biggest loser posting this, but VBScript + ASP. Not ASP.NET, just vanilla ASP. After building a couple of perl CGI scripts, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Not having to print() all my HTML was like a dream.

jtregunna• 15 years ago

Smalltalk should be in the list :)

greenyoda• 15 years ago

FORTRAN, on a mainframe, with punched cards, in the early 1970s. Shortly after that, BASIC on a hard-copy terminal. (Yeah, I'm an old geezer.)

dharden• 15 years ago

The GR program (I guess it was vaguely BASIC?) on the Apple IIe back in elementary school.

It was fun to do, mostly because of the instant gratification of actually seeing a line draw across the screen. We even got to making crude animation with for next loops (it pretty exciting for us kids!)

I can't find too much about it, but this site has a list of some of the commands (in the Graphic section):

http://www.landsnail.com/a2ref.htm

bkudria• 15 years ago

BASIC. Specifically, TI-BASIC on the TI-83+. I started out small, but I experimented in writing:

Fractal renderers on the graph screen

GA solvers using the L_1 through L_6 lists

Pong, on the homescreen, with an AI, with ']', 'o', and '['. I think I found a memory leak somewhere, because the game would get slower and slower if you played too long.

mattlarge• 15 years ago

Ada was the first language I learned properly, 1996 first year Computer Science. It was the last year that they taught Ada as the starter language at that University, they moved to Java after that.

julianz2• 15 years ago

BASIC, from a book, around 1978-9. This was several years before I ever actually saw or used a computer, because my dad was convinced it would be worth learning. Turns out he was right!

hsmyers• 15 years ago

IBM BAL360---Basic Assembler Language

Poll: What was the first programming language you learned?

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