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.