Programming Languages

Programming Languages carljm has used:

Timeline Graph

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

TI BASIC (TI 99/4A)

BASIC

QBasic

TI-BASIC

C++

bash

Javascript

PHP

Perl

sed

Java

Python

Scheme

TI BASIC (TI 99/4A)

1989–1992

First programming I ever did was on this hand-me-down "set-top box" with the static state cartridges (and oh, the games: Parsec, Donkey Kong...). I never hooked up the cassette recorder for persistent storage, so all my programs were recorded longhand in a spiral notebook and re-typed each time. I wrote a pretty massive RPG (considering), and a program that played "Happy Birthday".

BASIC

1989–1996

TI-BASIC on a TI-99/4A, later the TI-83 graphing calculator and hacking Nibbles on MS QBASIC.

QBasic

1992–1996

We hacked Nibbles like crazy; added stuff like wormholes/teleporters, moving/blinking walls, random debris falling from the sky... fun times.

1993–

Took lessons from my uncle. Created a 3x3 "pawn battle" graphical game for the first significant project. In college I ran a MUD based on CircleMUD and hacked on that some. I still touch C occasionally for a Python extension, but not often.

TI-BASIC

1994–1996

TI-BASIC on my TI-83 saved me from many a boring math class.

C++

1996–2002

Ah, Borland Turbo C++. For a while, I thought this was the language "real programs" should be written in. So I tried a lot of personal projects in it before and during college, and they were mostly painful. Not much use for it nowadays.

bash

1998–

Awful, but sometimes irresistibly practical.

Javascript

1998–

Not much of a choice; if you do web work, you have to know Javascript. I started back when it was called "DHTML" and if you were doing anything serious, you pretty much had to pick your target browser first.

PHP

1998–2005

My first real programming job was building a PHP-based CMS from the ground up. It's still around, though thankfully most of the code I wrote has been rewritten since.

Perl

1998–2003

My first dynamic-language love. I remember in college taking a look at an mbox-parser a friend was struggling for hours to write in C and telling him "I could do that in Perl in ten minutes." He called the challenge; I locked my door and had it done in 9:37. Haven't used it much since I found Python.

sed

1998–

I hesitate to call what I do with sed "programming," but I use it a fair bit.

Java

1999

Bought a book because it seemed obvious it was "the next thing to learn" after C/C++, but never even finished the book.

Python

2002–

My preferred language. Beautiful, easy-to-read code. Learned it from Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Python" online book while bored with PHP consulting gig.

Scheme

2008–

I like to play around with Scheme (mostly for reading SICP). Haven't used it for anything real.