mytechne : User jdunck

1987–1991

My first programming - accidentally discovered magic logical stuff going on when I edited rather than ran a .bas file (IIRC). I could have sworn it was earlier than this, and on an Apple][+, but it was definitely a throwing-bananas artillery game. Wikipedia says gorilla.bas wasn't released until 1991, so perhaps I recall incorrectly.

Turbo Pascal

1990–1992

Took a Computer Math course (super-nerd elective). About 3 weeks into it, I started helping my teacher; lots of other students were struggling.

C

1994–

My first real job was doing data entry for MCI. I smoked, and a developer on their CAD customization team did, too. Chatting one day, he mentioned they were thinking of bringing on a co-op. I told him I'd done a little programming, and would love a shot. They gave me one. I started learning C at night, and faking it by day. I did OK. I've dabbled in C since.

Assembly

1995–1996

Learned for college, played with it a little outside class. Enough to appreciate how the machine works, enough to welcome C.

VisualBasic

1995–2001

At MCI, on the heels of me learning C, there was this newish thing-- dynamic programming for the web. I had heard of the web, and MCI had a fast connection for those days. I'd even used UI Urbana's list of sites page. Another dev had written some VB 3 behind CGI to drive some data entry extranet site, then transferred to another department. Someone needed to add features, and that turned out to be me. It was pretty amusing trying to explain that there was more to the program than the <input type='submit'>, and no, it would take more than a few minutes to rewrite the whole thing. With detours, VB 3-6 was my bread and butter for quite a while.

VBScript

1996–2000

When I decided to move on from MCI, it was kind of in a hurry -- my bills were suddenly higher than an hour-and-rate-limited co-op position could support. But I had something going for me -- the web. I got a contracting job at Ernst & Young, using VBScript 1.0 and this new fangled ActiveX (shipping in IE 3.0, 1996). We used VBScript on the server and client. A terrible language. I tried to explain that we could use JavaScript instead, but VBScript was the ASP default, and besides, they'd just learned VBScript.... Soon enough, it was time to move on to MicroGrafx (around 1998). Since I'd been doing web stuff for 2 years and had client-side down at that point, I landed a job there, helping with their eCommerce site and their personalized electronic greeting cards (Flash-based). eCommerce became my career for a while...

Javascript

1996–

I learned JavaScript, such as it was, in IE3 when I tried to convince a team to switch from VBScript. We had no idea what we were doing with JavaScript at the time...

C++

1997–2000

My first exposure to object-oriented programming (at UTD) was with C++. I hated the language. It was so complicated compared to beautiful little C! The benefits of OOP were lost in me for a few years.

Smalltalk

1999–2000

After my disgust with C++, I started wondering who ever thought this OOP stuff was a good idea. I took a Programming Languages survey class, which included Smalltalk. Holy crap, what was Stroustrup smoking? This stuff was beautiful! Then I realized there were incompatible runtimes, and nobody could natively run it, and... I never worked in Smalltalk for real. Still, I'll listen to any Smalltalk expert-- like the LISPers, they're a smart group, generally unafraid to go an unpopular way in exchange for great tools.

Java

1999–

After Micrografx came Picasso, a little consulting startup. It was a sweatshop, but everybody there was better than me by a mile. I learned a lot -- CSS under the 4.x browsers, more VB, some Java. (Slight detour: learning CSS this early led me to css-discuss ( http://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/css-discuss/?search=jdunck ) , where I went from novice to expert in about a year by answering other people's questions. I became familiar with Simon Willison through that, and became aware of Django through him.) Java -- like C++ but not broken by design, with garbage collection and a fairly sane type system. But slow. And what's the deal with these applet things? And networked coffee pots? Really?

C#

2001–

I went to the SF VBits where MS announced .Net. It was so obviously better than the available (C++/VB) choices that I knew if I was sticking with MS, it would be with .Net. I started evangelizing to Interstate immediately. We had a bunch of VB/ActiveX, but the writing was on the wall. When I failed to gain converts/management support, I started looking at career options. That's when I discovered diveintopython.org and started taking Free Software seriously. If a free book about a free language could be that good, what else was I missing?

Python

2004–

When I found Dive Into Python, I read it over a single weekend. I started using it for any non-production work, and started daydreaming about a job using it. Simon told me they were trying to open Django, and I started poking at Ruby On Rails as a proxy. (I'd seen a demo of Django's pre-release admin in March 2004 and was sold.) Meanwhile, I cared about journalism, and had been following this interesting Dallas blog: http://blog.pegasusnews.com/2005/04/pleased_to_meet.html It turned out they were the first licensee of Ellington (the Django CMS) and I hit it off with Mike, one of the founders.

Erlang

2006–2007

In March 2005, I happened to pick up DDJ (which I didn't read regularly) and saw Sutter's article: http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm This got me thinking about concurrency, and that lead me to Erlang. I don't think Erlang is a generally great answer to the problem, but it's very interesting. (My money is on Clojure in general.)

Clojure

2008–

Having been not-entirely-satisfied with Erlang and curious about Lisps (I've watched most of the SICP lectures but never used Lisp for real), I was glad to see Clojure. JVM + Lisp + concurrency primitives + cheap immutable structures. Wow. There's no rebuttal of Amdahl's law, but this is as close as we'll get, I say.