A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.
31 January 2011
I had forgotten how ugly Fortran could be, tho it has gotten a lot prettier since 1979/1980.
And it caused me to reflect on all the programming languages I have used over the years, starting from my earliest days…
* TI-59, whatever language that thing used. I had no idea what I was doing really but was intrigued. * Fortran. Yay punchcards. * COBOL. ugh. * Basic in many forms. Apple’s Integer Basic was maybe the first, or maybe the Basic on the TI 99/4 * PL/1. bad memories here. A command for everything, programming was an exercise in finding the right command. * ASM in 6501, 68k, and x86 flavors at least. I am sure there were a few more in there too. probably my first in depth coding. * Forth. always thought it was interesting. * Pascal. * C and a little C++ tho the C++ came much later of course. still as comfortable in c as anything. * APL. what a terrible idea for a language! unreadable 10 minutes after you looked away from it. impossible to type. * dBase. ok barely a language but useful. * Hypertalk. never anything serious but always fun. * So many batch language variants I can’t remember. * Javascript. * Java. never did much with. * Perl. learned enough to deal with movable type at one point, never loved it. * PHP. * Python. still learning. mostly interested in scientific use with numpy/scipy. * MatLAB.
Sure I missed some. Probably forgot some on purpose due to the pain they caused.