thanks, I was resisting the urge to say the same. “Programming Language/One” or “PL/I”, which seem inconsistent but there you go. Wikipedia acknowledges “sometimes written PL/1” and several of the references the Wikipedia page points to get it wrong, too.Tsk.
In the mid-1970s, I was a graduate student using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for some work. I took a Fortran IV class about the same time.
Years later, working in a completely different field, I happened to mention to some people that I had worked with Fortran IV in the 1976 time-frame. Over the next few months, I was contacted by recruiters who needed Fortran programmers for legacy systems. I kept telling them that (a) I had only taken the one course and done a little bit of programming necessary for my research, (b) it was over 30 years ago, and (c) I was perfectly happy with where I was employed.
Recruiters are apparently self-perpetuating because I was still contacted several years later on occasion.
My first language in high school CS was Turbo Pascal, not much reason to use that now. My second was Borland C++, tons of C and C++ derivatives are extremely popular and useful now, but not so much the Borland one.
Literally all I remember is = vs :=
I’ve written production software in Turbo Pascal. It was a million times more usable than the “academic” Pascal I used in introductory CS classes.
When I went to school, in the Stone Age, I learned, in chronological order IIRC, Assembler, Basic, Fortran, Cobol and RPG.
I remember when I was learning RPG taking a program that had taken me 3 or 4 days to write in Cobol, tand rewriting it in RPG in an afternoon.
At that point I decided I liked RPG better and got a job in an RPG shop using IBM mainframes.
For 30+ years I wrote in some flavor of RPG. (RPG, RPG II, RPG III, RPG IV, RPG/ILE) with a little Basic here and there.
I don’t know if anybody uses it anymore.
In the 1990s I used a statistical program called SORITEC which doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. (Did it really exist? I wonder)
I was working at a small consulting company and that was what the client wanted. Since then I’ve never heard mention of it.
I mentioned upthread about pushing Logo to its limits, but yes, it was not just a novelty language for kids like me…
Not sure if it has any modern use, but the 80s and 90s… it was pretty cool.
I think the major thing was “an easy language for beginners”. I learnt Turbo Pascal roughly adjacent to Logo, having mastered GW BASIC. So an easy language to learn. Pascal was way more powerful but I was into graphics at the time and Turbo Pascal just did not offer what I wanted.
A few years later Flash did, and then I became a code nerd. So C#, the godforsaken ASP.NET and … history moves on. I like Kotlin and Java these days. None of which are graphic, sadly, but, hey… they make me a salary.
Too late to edit, but I really like LOGO. I can find analogues online or in VMs, but I can’t find the specific shitty one I learnt how to program with.
Some IBM specific thing, I think.
Like many people here, I learned FORTRAN as an undergrad and used it fir years. Then it just died off.
But a few years ago I was doing Industrial Archaeology on the software our company was using (the people who had written the code had all left, so I was trying to figure out how it worked), and I discovered, hidden way deep within the code, was a core written in FORTRAN. I guess they never threw anything away, or re-coded it.
In 1955 or 56, Penn acquired a Univax 1 and I learned a bit of its programming (essentially machine code) but never did anything with it.
In 1975 my department bought a Wang minicomputer whose operating system was BASIC and I learned to program a bit in that language. In 1982, I (or my research grant) bought an IBM-PC with 64 K of memory and I wrote some programs (including a modem control program) in BASIC. In the meantime, I started coauthoring a book and we worked in TeX (which can be viewed as a language), even though neither of us had access to a TeX compiler, which at that time needed a mainframe. Then Byte had an issue devoted to Forth and I really loved that language. Eventually, I learned it well enough to write a mini-TeX compiler that interpreted what it could and left space what it couldn’t (diagrams, which we drew in by hand). At any rate, it was good enough to send the book to a publisher, which accepted it. They had access to a TeX compiler and that’s how it was printed. I loved that language, but I think it has disappeared. There were a couple mentions of it above. It is essentially stack based and RPN. You execute “words” that take their arguments off the stack. You can also define new words, which is where its powers lie.
I guess I haven’t written more than a toy program (in BASIC) in 35 years.
I’m aware of or have used an awful lot of these. BASIC on my C64. And I used it on DTSS, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System where BASIC was invented. My wife was a grad student there and I wrote a simple program for her.
I taught Pascal when I was a TA at Illinois, and my dissertation involved hacking Jensen and Wirth’s Pascal compiler into one for my own language, called MARBLE.
I used PL/I at MIT and then again in grad school. Multics was implemented in PL/I, so it was the native language there. The Pascal compiler couldn’t compile itself on our system, so they translated Pascal code into PL/I code. I got it to compile itself in preparation for my research. I taught PL/I also in a CS 101 class.
The interesting language on Multics was BCPL, a systems programming language and a precursor to C. UNIX, remember, started when Bell Labs gave up on Multics.
I never used Snobol, a string processing language, but I read the manual which I picked up at an MIT Press sale. Simula67 was one of the very first object oriented langauges. I never used it but I studied it when I took a seminar on designing an Object Oriented Language around 1977. It inspired me to create MARBLE which was orbject oriented Pascal, but the objects were hardware entities.
When I was in Illinois I learned and wrote a lesson or two in TUTOR, which was a language for Computer Aided Instruction on the PLATO system. PLATO had the world’s first chat rooms, message boards, instant messages, multiplayer dungeons, and online newspaper.
I knew some LISP, and one of the luckiest things that happened to me was that I flunked a LISP test for the MIT AI Lab. Lucky because if I had gone that route I would have graduated into one of the several AI winters.
Ah, for the days when every issue of SIGPLAN notices had a new language or two described therein.
Not a programmer by any means, but I learned BASIC in the late 70s on a Commodore PET and learned to count open and closed parentheses on my fingers. I still do that in my SQL queries, even though the IDL highlights them for me.
Back when I was about 12, my older brother who was in grad school at the time took me on a tour of the university computing center. They had an IBM 1130 in a separate little room, which I thought was a business computer but was actually a low-end 16-bit machine for educational and technical markets. But what really impressed me was the majestic IBM 7040 mainframe. Somewhere there is a picture of 12-year-old me sitting proudly in front of the 7040 console, pretending to push buttons. The machine lurked like a monstrous being in a large computer room dedicated entirely to it.
That was the summer when I learned programming for the first time with my brother’s help, using FORTRAN IV which was the premier high-level language on the 7040. Programs had to be keypunched and submitted for batch processing. I still remember some of the control cards – $IBSYS and $IBJOB were used to identify an account and a new job in the batch queue, and $IBFTC invoked the FORTRAN compiler, immediately followed by the actual FORTRAN statements.
One of the features of the 7040 FORTRAN compiler was that you could request a listing of the generated assembler code. I did this a lot so I have to modify my earlier statement that I had programmed in PDP-8, PDP-11, and PDP-10 assembler – by noting the correspondence between FORTRAN statements and the generated assembler code, I learned MAP – the Macro Assembly Program for the IBM 7040 – and wrote various programs in it just for fun. This came in very handy later on when the familiarity with machine language concepts made it easier to learn assembler when I really needed to use it.
I love little anecdotes like this, which I had probably forgotten about if I ever knew it – for the most part, my professional career in computing had very little to do with IBM. The closest I came was occasionally working with gateways to connect IBM mainframes through their unwieldy hierarchical SNA network architecture to proper computers! 
The use of the Roman numeral in “PL/I” seems like an odd choice, and one could easily forget and use the numeral “1”, as indeed I did. Because IBM loved to use the slash to separate a name from a number, as in System/360, System/36, System/38, and OS names like VM/370. To stick a Roman numeral in there seems incongruous. Sure there was FORTRAN II and FORTRAN IV, but there was no slash there! And even that practice got abandoned with FORTRAN 77.
I have absolutely never, ever used Turbo Pascal, except to write a program for the class for which I had to learn Turbo Pascal.
Also had a class in DOS in 20fucking04. Who used DOS then? Had to buy a 2.5 disk, and had to go to a computer store and ask them if they had an old 2.5 drive they would sell me. They found a very dusty one they gave me for free, but did charge me for the adapter I needed to connect it to my motherboard.
I don’t think I can recall enough DOS to pass that class, but I did some in the mid nineties. MsDOS, of course.
I have been trying to find a copy (on and off) so I can run it in a VM (assuming I can also find an ancient version of Windows free, back from the days when launching a program took a couple of hours via multiple floppy disks. I am old enough to recall the miracle of actual windows on Windows).
I think our machines had DOS by default, but I now own a Mac. So a bit of complexity.
Also GOTO. The worst legacy command. Thanks Microsoft. Though that was GWBASIC, not DOS, as far as I recall.
Now I think about it, I dual boot my Mac with OSX and Windows 10.
I wonder if I could add Windows 98 (or my favorite, Windows 2000 Server Edition)
On further research, blaming GWBASIC was incorrect.
GOTO has an earlier origin.
I thought all versions of Windows had DOS which the operator can use via the command prompt.
GOTO was part of BASIC (and other early languages) from the beginning. Don’t blame Microsoft. (Or is “Thanks Microsoft” like “Thanks Obama”?)
Look at UTM: