Programming Languages

Programming Languages gnat has used:

Timeline Graph

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

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

Commodore BASIC

6502 Assembly

Turbo Pascal

TeX

Modula-2

Tcl

Perl

bash

PHP

Ruby

Python

Commodore BASIC

1981–1985

My first programming language on my first computer, the C=64. I still close my eyes and exhale blissfully remembering it.

6502 Assembly

1982–1985

Learned on the C=64. Still remember that $A9 was LDA in 6502 machine code, which is a startlingly useless fact that I'll take to my grave. Never managed to get an assembler working on the C64, so I assembled all my programs by hand on graph paper. I appreciate my tools now.

Turbo Pascal

1985–1988

Stopped using Turbo Pascal once I learned C, but it was the first structured programming language (i.e., one with curly braces) that I ever used, and the first IDE.

1988–

Learned C on my first IBM-compatible computer. Taught myself from Kernighan and Ritchie ("the White Book"). Wrote a windowing library (like curses) for money. Then got to university and was taught about memory management and realised why the library crashed all the time.

TeX

1991–1995

I wrote html2latex back in the dark days of the interwebs, because I needed to print web pages for people. My ignorance of good C programming was only matched by my ignorance of good (La)TeX.

Modula-2

1991

This was the language taught in 2nd year Computer Science. What I learned from this: a brilliant idea (like Pascal) is rarely followed by more brilliant ideas.

Tcl

1992

Used it third year computer science. Never used it again. "What if you could bash-script a gui?" is a question that you could ask once, but not inflict the answer on anyone else.

Perl

1992–

Picked up Perl in the early days of the web. It was used to reformat text into HTML, and of course in the elegant Plexus web server. Back then, before CGI, we got dynamic web pages by hacking the web server to do different things based on the URL. It's obviously better to do that in Perl than in C, so Perl took off. I moved to the US, helped tchrist with the FAQ which lead to the cookbook which lead to training and conferences and YAPC and perl6 and The Perl Foundation and all sorts of wonderful things. Perl was the first time I saw a community coalesce. There's something magic when people who know each other online meet for the first time in person. I've seen it happen at other conferences since, but the early days of The Perl Conference were special because it was the first time I'd seen it happen, and I was part of it. Love the Perl community just as I love Perl, warts and all. I use other programming languages from time to time, hang out in other communities from time to time, but Perl and I know each other the best.

bash

1993–1998

Learned it doing web work, before I got the hang of Perl. Then had to use it when I worked as a sysadmin. Now I'm grateful every day I don't have to bang my head on the desk trying to figure out how to make the argument evaluation/whitespace-splitting logic do what I want.

PHP

2001–2003

Learned it to edit "Programming PHP". It makes Perl look consistent.

Ruby

2007–

I like the language a lot. Haven't used it enough to become fluent, but it feels more natural to me than Python.

Python

2007–

I know enough to be dangerous, but not well enough to cast out my reference books.