Slashdot Asks: What Was Your First Programming Language? (stanforddaily.com)

This question was inspired by news that Stanford's computer science professor Eric Roberts will try JavaScript instead of Java in a new version of the college's introductory computer programming course. The Stanford Daily reports: When Roberts came to Stanford in 1990, CS106A was still taught in Pascal, a programming language he described as not "clean." The department adopted the C language in 1992. When Java came out in 1995, the computer science faculty was excited to transition to the new language. Roberts wrote the textbooks, worked with other faculty members to restructure the course and assignments and introduced Java at Stanford in 2002... "Java had stabilized," Roberts said. "It was clear that many universities were going in that direction. It's 2017 now, and Java is showing its age." According to Roberts, Java was intended early on as "the language of the Internet". But now, more than a decade after the transition to Java, Javascript has taken its place as a web language.
In 2014 Python and Java were the two most commonly-taught languages at America's top universities, according to an analysis published by the Communications of the ACM. And Java still remains the most-commonly taught language in a university setting, according to a poll by the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. In a spreadsheet compiling the results, "Python appears 60 times, C++ 54 times, Java 84 times, and JavaScript 28 times," writes a computing professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, adding "if Java is dying (or "showing its age"...) it's going out as the reigning champ."

I'm guessing Slashdot's readers have their own opinions about this, so share your educational experiences in the comments. What was your first programming language?

Comments

Basic

[nixer]

Like many from my era... It took years to undo the damage!

Re:Basic

[mdsharpe]

BASIC on the Commodore 64. You could just turn it on and immediately start typing lines of code :-)

Pascal not "clean"?

[lsllll]

WTF? Pascal is not clean? Pascal was DESIGNED to be clean. It is very clean. It has strict type checking and is extremely sensitive to syntax. It doesn't allow any hanky panky to take place with any of its variables. You can't modify any variable without its assignment operator. Variables have to be declared, or else you get a runtime error. How is that not clean? Tell me one thing Pascal (Not Turbo Pascal and other flavors, but the language as it was created) does that is not clean?

Now, don't get me wrong. Pascal was a great language to learn straight programming, but was very limiting for every-day programming. Come Turbo Pascal. I must have written dozens, if not hundreds, of TSR programs that created ISRs, from sitting in the background and capturing keyboard input to recognizing that you changed your password on a NetWare server and sync it up to other servers. I even wrote a visual Connect 4 game that you could play over the network with your buddies, when the only LAN game I was aware of was "ncsnipes". Now those are things Pascal wasn't meant for, but Turbo Pascal extended the language very successfully and created a world where there was no end to what you could develop.