response 25 of 49:

Jan 27 21:03 UTC 2007

 If Commodore ever shipped REXX with AmigaOS it must've been after I 
 gave up on the Amiga platform.

response 27 of 49:

Jan 27 21:51 UTC 2007

- DOS batch (not really a language, I guess, but close)
- BASIC (using GWBASIC on a PC clone, also on Apples, Commodores, and
TRS-80s...whatever I could get my hands on)
- 6502 machine language (I didn't own an assembler for my VIC20, so I
wrote the program in assembly language and then hand-assembled it.)
- Pascal (using MS QuickPascal, my first exposure to a compiled language)
- Bourne shell
- C++ (programming class at MTU, required for my EE major)
- C ("Teach Yourself C Programming In 21 Days," which I used mainly as a
reference to the differences between C++ and C.)
- Perl (learned from the "camel book")
- PHP

I've tinkered a bit in TCL, altering other people's code, but I'm not
fluent enough in it to write an application myself.

response 29 of 49:

Jan 28 08:57 UTC 2007

I feel a bit of a twit posting here amongst all these people who learnt to
program in their sleep on a mainframe, but I'm currently muddling through sh,
bash and python, hahah.

response 31 of 49:

Jan 28 20:05 UTC 2007

I forget my precise chronology, but I know that I was coding
BASIC in primary school and right up through secondary
school.  I did some Z80 machine code (pencil and paper
assembly) early in high school, starting out on my sister's
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K+.  The first machine I ever owned
was a ZX-81 (Timex 1000 for the yanks) with 1K RAM, b&w text
-only display and no sound.  I was programming long before I
owned my own machine though.  I've tried quite a few
programming languages since leaving primary school, but the
one I like best has to be Pascal for its consistency and
readability.

Operating systems: Acorn DFS, ADFS & NFS, CP/M-80, CP/M-86
Concurrent CP/M-86 (four users running up to four apps each
with pre-emptive multitasking and optionally windowing and
graphics on an 80186.  No wonder MS Windows didn't impress
me!) PC-DOS, MS-DOS, various unices, VAX/VMS, Oberon etc.

response 33 of 49:

Jan 29 16:16 UTC 2007

My programming language chronology:

Burroughs 205 (aka "Datatron") machine language, circa 1960.  Yes, you 
read that right - machine language.  This was my first exposure to 
programming, as part of a summer job as machine operator for this vaccum 
tube monster.  I think there were was an experimental assembler and HLL 
compiler, both developed in-house (the latter by Alan Perlis), but not 
many people used them.

Fortran II (1962).  I took a summer short course because I was 
interested, but didn't actually use Fortran until years later.

Basic, late 1960s and early 1970s.  This was the original Dartmouth 
Basic with the absurd restrictions on variable names.

Fortran IV, early 1970s.  I learned it because the math department I was 
teaching in was starting to get into computer science as well, and I was 
assigned to teach the beginning programming course.  The hardware was an 
IBM 1130, input was via punched cards.

Via teaching I became seriously interested in computer science, taught 
more courses and learned more languages.  Also, my school had acquired a 
DEC-10 timesharing system with easy access via terminals and a decent 
collections of languages for the time.  So in the 1970s I learned:

TOPS-10 assembly language - taught it, and also the Ford Motor Company 
paid me pretty good money for writing software in it.

Algol-60 - my introduction to "structured programming".

Snobol - a cool string-processing language, popular with linguists

Lisp

Pascal - which my department adopted as its primary teaching language, 
so I spent a *lot* of time in the Pascal environment.

Simula-67 - the first OOP language, and a real eye-opener for me, 
especially after reading Dahl and Hoare's paper "Hierarchical Program 
Structures", which lays out the object-oriented paradigm very clearly 
and succinctly.  This was a great language with an excellent TOPS-10 
implementation.  It's ideas survived even if the language itself didn't.

Exposure and access to Unix in the early 1980s led to:

C
Awk
Sh

And then in the 1990s:

C++
Java
Perl

I've done a fair amount of CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programming in 
Perl, C, and Unix shell, and some PHP programming as well, but beyond 
that haven't done much with the languages like Ruby, Python, and 
JavaScript that people use for web-centric programming nowadays.  I view 
this as a deficiency that I need to remedy.

response 35 of 49:

Jan 30 13:19 UTC 2007

I'm sure that's true, but my motivation for learning them at this point 
would be to program for the web.

response 37 of 49:

Jan 31 20:39 UTC 2007

Yeah, I somehow forgot about all the really arcane & complex MS-DOS batch file
"sripting" I used to [have to] do.

I can't remember now if for the number theory course I took at U-M,
if I used Fortran or Pascal...

Fortran - "what for"?  ;-)

I see that no one has admitted to knowing/using RPG yet...  ;-)

response 39 of 49:

Feb 1 17:27 UTC 2007

I had an instructor in Jr College who was actively encouraging me to
learn AS/400 and RPG, swearing it was more relevant and useful than
UNIX+C+Java. I politely nodded. I should take her for a tour of the
multiphase datacenter that has over 10k UNIX/Linux/BSD servers and only
1 AS/400 (and we do not ever touch the AS/400 -- we simply provide power
and 10 Mbits to the outside world).

response 41 of 49:

Feb 2 22:56 UTC 2007

I disagree about PostScript!  It certainly *is* a programming language!

response 43 of 49:

Feb 3 21:34 UTC 2007

Yup.  I've seen people write Postscript to generate graphs where all the
printer got was a program and a pile of numbers.  All the calculation
happened inside the printer.  There's rarely any reason to do such
stunts, so Postscript mostly ends up being used as a page description
language, but it *is* a full-fledged programming language in its own right.

I just remembered I also did some work with Borland Delphi.  Delphi is
an interesting rapid-development environment.  It's somewhat reminiscent
of Visual Basic, but it's based on Pascal and is mainly aimed at
database applications.

response 45 of 49:

Feb 7 21:19 UTC 2007

uh mcnally, ya think I just might have known that, and was making a funny?

response 47 of 49:

Feb 14 04:36 UTC 2017

A fascinating item.

My own programming evolution, abbreviated and with omissions
due to memory lapses:

- BASIC, FORTRAN (probably IV) on a local university's
mainframe during a jr. high summer program in the late 1970s
(FORTRAN was done on punch cards).

- AppleSoft BASIC & other variants (TRS-80, ...) through high
school.

- Scheme, FORTRAN (77?), & BASIC on a second-hand VIC-20
before I washed out as an aerospace engineering student at
university 1982-3. (Dijkstra was thinking of me when he weote
that BASIC programmers "are mentally mutilated...".)

- COBOL & C during my second stab at college (business school)
-1987.

- PL/AS (PL/I derivative) & REXX on CP/CMS mainframe for first
job out of college doing telecommunications programming -1991.

- COBOL variants, AWK (finagled my way into doing one
program), ASAP during the early years at my current company.
In my current job I don't get to do any programming other than
an occassional Windows batch file or Excel macro.

- Since the mid-1990s I've become increasingly interested in
programming as a hobby and have taught myself Perl, Bourne
shell, C, FORTRAN (really useful for retro-computing since
most of the revived or simulated propietary mainframes come
with a FORTRAN compiler), Common Lisp & other varients,
several MUD-based languages, HTML/CSS (if you count them as
languages), and Forth. 

- Recently I've been (re)looking at Rexx and VMS DCL.

response 49 of 49:

Aug 29 10:24 UTC 2017

I personally started with BASIC, because one time my cousin's PC
clone wouldn't boot up to DOS, and went straight to ROM BASIC. It's
interesting that I had the patience (and the boredom!) to figure
out that it was BASIC, and that the books my aunt bought were about
writing BASIC programs.

From them on, switched to learning Microsoft BASIC (GW-BASIC, in
particular), and then later on in 5th or 6th grade, started learning
Pascal (Turbo Pascal), before trying to learn C (and failing). Went
back to learning C later in high school, got my hand on an illicit
copy of VisualBasic 4, then quickly picked up Java first year of
college. Did a bunch of DOS batch file programming in high school
as well; a bunch of my friends and I would write "virus" batch
files on a shared notebook. Fun times.

Now, I code in Python and Java for work, although I prefer to
write in Clojure (learned Lisp when I was already working).