Programming languages I have known

PROGRAMMING

Gearing up for some programming-language-related posts, I’ve been thinking about the languages I’ve been exposed to over the years (those years being, specifically, 1981 to 2006).

To the best of my memory, everything I’ve ever written more than “Hello World” in is listed below. Languages that are italic I’ve written useful, if sometimes small, programs in. Languages that are bold are languages I’ve been paid to code in – though that includes things like selling shareware games as a teenager!

  • Applescript
  • Assembly (8086)
  • Assembly (Z-80)
  • BASIC
  • C
  • Forth
  • Fortran
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Logo
  • Modula-2
  • Oberon
  • Objective-C
  • Pascal
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • Prolog
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Scheme

It would be a pretty impressive list if I were actually current in more than a couple of them today. Of the ones I’ve been paid to work with, much of it was very short-term. I only worked in Fortran once, for instance, modifying an economist’s statistics program that was to be sent behind the Iron Curtain to analyze USSR economic data that no outsiders were allowed direct access to. Why a college sophomore majoring in Languages and Literature was entrusted with this task I may never know!

I still consider myself a journeyman programmer with much to learn, and I always enjoy grappling with new languages. In recent years I haven’t quite hit the Pragmatic Programmers’ guideline of one new language per year, but I’m interested in trying. What language might be next? More on that in a future post.

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