Personal usage: Sinclair, Apple II, and Macintosh BASIC dialects; Logo, HyperTalk
School: Pascal, FORTRAN 77, Common Lisp
Work: Perl
HyperTalk was what powered HyperCard, the pre-WWW hypermedia app on Macintoshes. Its legacies: the pointing finger cursor for hyperlinks in most web browsers, event names like “onmouseup” in JavaScript, and Myst.
I actually really liked it, though I never enjoyed Javascript. My favourite at the moment is Kotlin, followed by C#.
I once wrote an inverse kinematics engine in Actionscript, old-school style, pencil on paper. I was in hospital with no access to a computer. When I got out, I typed it in… …and it just worked.
Flawlessly.
Not sure how I got that right, most code has a few subtle bugs, at least on the first write.
Ha, thinking about this, yes I have enjoyed javascript. I once generated a set of four internet explorer windows, set to +/-100px by 100px, which, powered by javascript, “rotated” around each other, as if on a three dimensional plane, changing their “focus” and size as they did so. My boss was astounded.
I have a vague memory from a CS or math class in college: on a test day, the prof had one of the other members of the Math/CS department substitute for him to give us our test. As the substitute prof walked in with the tests in his hand, he said to us (jokingly) “I take it you can all program in Modula 2?”
I had another prof who was quite fond of Scheme (a dialect of Lisp), so I had to use that for at least one of his classes.
At one point I was fluent in BASIC (several different versions over the years) and Pascal, back when those were commonly used.
I worked for a while at a Silicon Valley company whose product was a CAD package written for some reason in PL/1 which I had to learn. They used Silicon Graphics workstations, and I recall the SGI people griping about having to maintain a PL/1 compiler just for this one customer…
FORTRAN in initial “into to engineering” class, my computer science class (data structures, which is the second CS course – you could skip the first if you convinced the powers that be that you could distinguish 0s from 1s ) used Pascal.
Did a little C (no ++ back then), and had a course on scheme (lisp like) and APL (not using special keyboard, used multiple ASCII chars).
Uses 8085 assembly language for our wire-wrapped single board computer we designed/built.
Of languages I used at school, only c (and derivatives) has been used by me much since. (I did have to do a little 6502 assembly, but that was a LONG time ago)
Same here. Could you actually do useful stuff with Logo? All I remember is that turtle and inputting commands to make it move and turn direction. That said, that was my first experience with home computers, on an Apple ][e, and I was smitten and begged and begged until my parents bought me a VIC-20, probably around $50 (maybe around $150-175 in today’s money) back in 1984 or so. Or maybe it was around $100, but real cheap for a computer of its time. Came with all 3.5K of RAM (officially listed as 5K, but 1.5K was taken up for system stuff.)
I remember one presentation about APL where a formula was put up consisting of each of the APL special character being used once. I can’t remember the full formula (and couldn’t find it on the net) but the last character was ° indicating pi, so if the last three characters were have been ! ⌈° that would equate to 24 (round pi up to 4 and take the factorial).
Anyway after working through every symbol the final answer came to 42.
Forgive me if some of Application/Use comments are off. This is the best I recall. It’s been a long row.
Pascal in College. Punch cards, what fun.
AWK, massage Informix data
Avenue. A proprietary language that was used by ESRI (GIS). Long gone as far as I can tell.
AML another proprietary language for ESRI (GIS)
dbase. Took data from an Informix database and exported it to a .csv (knowing me I did not use a comma for a delimiter. I hate commas for a delimiter) text file from what I recall. Also used dbase to write an accounts receivable application for our family business. I have NO background in accounting, but it was used for years.
Planning on retiring in a year. My recent work has been in VB, HTML, Jscript and Python. Not developing anymore though. The road is to recreate the stuff I’ve done with more plug and play stuff. There is still customization though.
For custom stuff it looks like it will be Python (that will be mostly data manipulation). I’ve a person that will be taking care of that. She is very good.
Ahhh memory lane. I am sure I will have to add some edits as the memory comes back to me.
BASIC (several forms in the Early years)
Assembly (also several forms)
Fortran
COBOL
ADA
I have used some tools for Computer Based Training development that did not really have Languages but you could do some programming. The 2 that come to mind for that would be WISE (on a semi unix based system) and ToolBook for the PC.
The above was college and my training career. After that in Small and Big business…
VB 6.0
PHP
C++
Visual Basic .NET
C#
JAVA with numerous frameworks.
JavaScript from various frameworks, IE typescript
And lastly Python.
My first language was a version of PL/1. Never used it again.
My 2nd was Fortran II (on an IBM 1130). Never used or saw any form of Fortran again. Also learned Cobol around that time. Never had anything to do with that either.
One language I used for a while was Pascal. Both mainframe and later Turbo Pascal. Haven’t touched that in a looong time.
I learned a lot of languages in a PL course. The most interesting was SNOBOL. Griswold later came up with the Icon language, a more structured version. Lots of really cool pattern matching methods. I used Icon for some personal stuff for a while. Not a lot of people heard of this let alone used it…
Just so many languages I used briefly that I can’t possibly remember them all and nearly all of them are long defunct.
I don’t think I’ve used C in anything since I switched to C++. Still use that here and there.
I learned Java. Even got a cert in it. Over time I learned to really, really, really hate it. So I avoid it and don’t even play with someone else’s code for any project.
My favorite shell for scripting is csh. (Get over it, okay?) It just works nicely for my style. Not many people still use that.
It may have had its day, but I don’t recall it ever being as widespread as COBOL or FORTRAN?
IIRC it was about 1989 when I was using it. I think it declined fairly quickly after that; at least, I never encountered anyone else using it…
Properly speaking, the IBM proprietary Algol-like language is “PL/I” as in Roman numeral one. They in fact copyrighted the names PL/I through PL/XCIX (99). They never used the other 98, but they were ready for runaway success if it had happened.
The slash and the Roman numeral are always required. The fact some folks got sloppy early and you see “PL/1” in the wild doesn’t make it right. Nor “PL1” or “PLI”.
As far as languages I have actually used in anger at work, I remember writing quite a bit of code in Oracle’s Pro*FORTRAN on a VAX…it was a precompiler that would allow you to write Oracle database applications in FORTRAN.
This was pretty cool since the only other option I had was using Oracle Forms 3.0. Forms was great for standard form-based data entry, but it wasn’t very useful for special apps that needed to be written in a procedural language, such as an app that would download transactions from a Symbol barcode scanner terminal and upload those to the database.
For stuff I never used at work, when I had a systems course where we were taught the basics of IBM 370 assembly language. Between that and the LISP that I had to use in a broad programming languages course, I have never once seen either of them in the wild.
It was an interesting language in some ways; quite complex for its day.
You could do things like define an integer variable with a length of an arbitrary number of bits, for example. And it would happily convert data types with wild abandon.
I imagine writing the compiler for it was quite a challenge!