![\"\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/8\/8a\/Blue-punch-card-front.png\")
<\/strong><\/p>\nFirst up, we have those that revealed their age with their punch-card toting past. \u00a0Though amusing, this past is perhaps less relevant to the “what programming language should we use today” discussion:<\/p>\n
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- “I started with Fortran IV<\/a> on punch cards. The compiler was the Purdue University Fast Fortran Translator […] ‘PUFFT, The Magic Dragon’.”<\/li>\n
- “My first programming experience was in PL\/1<\/a> on punch cards with eight hour turn-around time.”<\/li>\n
- “My first computer course was […] in FORTRAN IV, 24-hour turn-around for my punch-cards (if lucky) on an IBM 360<\/a>.”<\/li>\n
- “My first language was ‘MUSIC’, a language that had been developed at my university for teaching purposes. […] The whole idea of being able to create something on a computer was new and exciting. \u00a0I used to rush home from class to do my programming assignments. \u00a0Then I’d head off to the keypunch room, wait in line for a keypunch machine, punch up my deck, turn it in to a guy in a window, and come back the next day to get my output.”<\/li>\n
- “You guys had it easy! My punched cards had to be taken to another city by a carrier and the results carried back.\u00a0It took three days to a week to get the results. I was very disappointed that my program had bugs even after three rounds! […]\u00a0my first programming experience [was] in Fortran IV, followed by PL-1 and Lisp. My first internship required Basic, and my first job required Cobol and RPG II<\/a>. They really motivated me to go to grad school. I learned C++ and Java while teaching them.”<\/li>\n
- “Fortran IV : 1975 : Burroughs B6700<\/a>, (punchcards)
\nBinary : 1976 : Data General Nova<\/a>, (frontpanel bootstrap loader)
\nBasic : 1976 : Zilog Z8 microcontroller<\/a>
\n Z80 assembly<\/a> : 1980 :\u00a0IMSAI 8080<\/a>
\n Occam<\/a> : 1983 : INMOS Transputer<\/a>! […]”<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\nBASIC and Pascal<\/strong><\/p>\n
<\/strong>It seems that many of us were taught BASIC<\/a> at home and Pascal<\/a> early on. \u00a0Perhaps BASIC should be introduced in elementary school? \u00a0And revive Pascal? Wikipedia tells me that Pascal is used to develop Skype. \u00a0Really?<\/p>\n
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- I learned [BASIC] from my uncle […] We dialed in to the Dartmouth Timesharing System from his living room in Maryland, on a KSR 33<\/a>\u00a0teletype. Later, I learned Fortran in high school and Cobol in college, where I majored in Math, and assembly language for the Xerox Sigma 9. I learned Pascal, C, and Lisp in grad school. […] I figure if I wait long enough, I won’t have to learn Java.<\/li>\n
- […] BASIC on a Commodore 64 with cassette tape storage at home.\u00a0The first course I took was in high school using Pascal, which I still think is a great language. [… As] a general engineering student I […] only signed up for intro to CS because that was what you had to do to get Internet access\u00a0[… we] were still using Simula<\/a> […] I wish I could say that the class blew my mind, but it was the launch of Mosaic the same year that convinced me that there was a cool future in CS. I only learned C\/C++ for the OS course, and Java, Javascript and Python in grad school.<\/li>\n
- In my first CS class in college the language we programmed in was Pascal, but we also used a functional notation (mostly on paper!) to study recursion, fixpoint iteration, etc. Since I knew Pascal already from high school, I was kind of bored by those parts, but I was very excited by the functional language and recursion.<\/li>\n
- I learned a little BASIC very early, around first grade (so seven or eight), then got introduced to Logo early. I thought the turtle was silly, but loved recursion, lists, and self-modifying code, so spent my childhood trying to write LISP programs in something that wasn’t quite LISP. [I] learned Pascal and Prolog & wrote programs from books, but never had access to a compiler for either. Picked up C++\/C freshman year in college.<\/li>\n
- My dad taught me Basic when I was in elementary school. I had one high school computer science class that used a teaching-language called Turing<\/a>. The course was excellent and taught program flow and basic data structures. \u00a0I learnt Matlab and C for undergraduate research jobs. I took a course on object oriented programming for math majors in my senior year – we used C++. I can say that I absolutely did not understand object oriented programming until 2 years later when I needed it for a grad-school research project.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Parametron?
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/museum.ipsj.or.jp\/heritage\/images\/parametron1.gif\")
<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nAnd then we have what I can only describe as “other”:<\/p>\n
- […] BASIC on a Commodore 64 with cassette tape storage at home.\u00a0The first course I took was in high school using Pascal, which I still think is a great language. [… As] a general engineering student I […] only signed up for intro to CS because that was what you had to do to get Internet access\u00a0[… we] were still using Simula<\/a> […] I wish I could say that the class blew my mind, but it was the launch of Mosaic the same year that convinced me that there was a cool future in CS. I only learned C\/C++ for the OS course, and Java, Javascript and Python in grad school.<\/li>\n
- “My first programming experience was in PL\/1<\/a> on punch cards with eight hour turn-around time.”<\/li>\n