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

Fortran

[jfdavis668]

Needed it for an engineering course. My first actual programming course used PL/I

Re:Fortran

[Megane]

I'm not quite old enough to have used FORTRAN. I grew up on BASIC and Z-80 assembly language on a TRS-80 (and a bit of HP BASIC on equipment at school), but when I went to college in 1982, they were using PL/I. The first semester was even on IBM equipment, but fortunately they got a VAX late in the semester, because I managed to screw up my JCL by trying to reformat it to be readable. I still don't know why it took DEC so long to add the UNTIL statement to their PL/I compiler.

Then I got into programming on the Macintosh, so I started using Pascal. Also, Turbo Pascal was a thing, and they were both UCSD variants. But one of the worst things to do is use Pascal and PL/I at the same time. (as in same era, not simultaneously) The function headers are syntactically backwards to each other.

I didn't even officially switch over to C until after 2000. I even have one program I use sometimes that started with code I originally wrote in college in PL/I, then ported to Pascal, then again ported to C.

Re:Fortran

[lfp98]

There was competition at the time between FORTRAN and ALGOL. Physics majors learned ALGOL, which was supposed to be more humane and logical, but the engineers learned FORTRAN, with its brutal efficiency in packing the most computing into the smallest possible space - a big consideration when each line of code was hand-typed on an individual punch card. I was particularly fond of the arithmetic IF: "IF (x-y/z) 10, 15, 20" would take the program to line 10, 15 or 20 depending on whether x-y/z (or any arithmetic expression) was negative, zero or positive.

Re:Fortran

[Hognoxious]

Wasn't it still called Natural Philosophy then - and taught in Latin?

Re: Fortran

[coats]

Frankly, modern Fortran (F-90 or later) is a very well-structured programming language, at a higher level than (more structured than, and safer -- not as subject to buffer-overruns -- than) C: character-strings and multi-dimensional arrays are first class citizens in Fortran. And for what it's worth, I've written more than 15K lines of production Fortran in the last month...

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 :-)

Basic

[Chardros]

Of course.

Rust

[110010001000]

I have only used Rust. The other languages excluded me.

CHIP-8

[jabberw0k]

First computer was an RCA VIP, January 1977 (the TRS-80 and Apple ][ hadn't been introduced yet). To program the VIP, you flipped the RUN/RESET switch up while holding the 'C' key on the hex heypad, then '0' to write memory, then the four-digit address, then entered your hex codes. You had better have written your program out on paper ahead of time. Clear screen was 00E0. After awhile you could read programs just by looking at the hexdump. A lost art.

Pascal

[jonwil]

When I was a kid I had exposure to Basic and LOGO and a few other things but the first real programming I actually did would have been in Pascal (Turbo Pascal 6 if I remember correctly). These days most of my coding is in C and C++.

The most obscure thing I have ever programmed in would probably be assembly language for the 65816 CPU (an enhanced 16 bit version of the famous 6502 CPU). The main claim to fame for the 65816 was as the CPU in the Apple IIGS and also the CPU in the Super Nintendo (SNES ROM hacking is where I learned 65816 ASM)

LOGO

[fadethepolice]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... But I quickly switched to Basic as that was the language in all the magazines.

Re:LOGO

[lucasnate1]

I really liked the logo translations. As a child it was very useful to be able to program in hebrew, when my english was developing.

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.

English

[IHTFISP]

English.

Then arithmetic. Then algebra. Then geometry. Then integral/differential calculus.
Then TRS-80 Basic. Then 6502 assembly language. Then Forth.
Then Scheme. Then dBase II. Then C on Unix w/ tcsh & bash. Then Java. Etc.

Note that the question was “programming language”, not computer “programming language”.

First order logic came into play fairly early on, too, but that's not a language per se so much as a technique/methodology.