Programming Languages

Programming Languages greyfade has used:

Timeline Graph

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

QBasic

x86 Assembly

VisualBasic

Javascript

C++

VBScript

REBOL

Pascal

ColdFusion

PHP

bash

FORTRAN 77

sed

PL/SQL

Python

Ruby

Perl

AWK

Haskell

Erlang

MIXAL

Scheme

LISP

Common LISP

CoffeeScript

TeX

Commodore BASIC

1985–1992

I learned this at the age of 4, out of a couple "cookbook-style" programming books. One was for the Vic-20 and the other was the Commodore-64 Programmer's Reference. It kept me very entertained.

6502 Assembly

1986–1989

After seeing several programs that put a bunch of DATA statements at the bottom of the LIST and GOTO'd them, I decided to learn what that was about. Discovered that my Epyx FastLoad cartridge had a debugging assembler, so I started following the examples in my programmer's reference.

QBasic

1991–1997

Got a shiny new 386 with DOS, and QBasic was the only thing it had that I knew of that let me write little toy programs. I miss Gorillas.BAS.

x86 Assembly

1992–

Got bored with QBasic, and accidentally stumbled on the "debug" command. Immediately went on a search at the library for 8086 programming books. Peter Norton's Programmer's Guide was as a Bible to me.

1995–

Got Internet access, discovered DJGPP.

VisualBasic

1996–1997

Took a class. Wanted to learn programming more formally. Didn't. Regret it.

Javascript

1996–

Discovered web development

C++

1996–

Still use it, and, I dare say, love it.

VBScript

1997–2012

REBOL

1998–

Learned about Rebol from Amiga hacker, History teacher, and friend, Jim, in high school. Didn't really do anything with it until much later when I decided to sit down and learn it properly. Wrote an automated IRC client in under 6 hours, from scratch.

Pascal

2000

An intro to programming class at the local college. Ended up teaching myself when the instructor proved that he knew less about it than most of the other students.

ColdFusion

2001

Used it for a single project. Never again.

PHP

2002–2013

A terrible train-wreck of a language. If I never use it again, it'll be too soon. Hated it since 2005, only used it because of legacy code or client requirements.

bash

2003–

FORTRAN 77

2003–2004

Needed to use an old function used by FCC rules. Never again. But ITPLBV.F is still pretty cool.

sed

2004–

PL/SQL

2004–

Python

2006–

Python has always struck me as an awkward language. Not *bad* like PHP, but it definitely left me with the feeling that it was less elegant than it could be. Some of the changes in CPython 3 seem to confirm some of my concerns.

Ruby

2006–

Ruby surprised me in that it was a far more intuitive language than I would have expected. Far more of a joy to use than most other languages I knew at the time.

Perl

2007–

Never properly learned Perl until I needed it at work one day. I very quickly noticed that my own (novice) code was more compact and clear than any of the PHP I'd ever written. My first clue that my gut feelings about PHP were right.

AWK

2008–

Didn't properly learn to use AWK until very recently. It's like Perl-lite.

Haskell

2008–

Starting to have fun, now...

Erlang

2009–

MIXAL

2009–

Scheme

2009–