G'day Ian,

I recognize what you're talking about, but assembly left me totally confused, I had mates that used it, but I opted for the easier way.

Your knowledge went far deeper than mine.

I did use scripting with AutoCAD, but again that was using preset routines. My biggest ever effort was writing a database, tape based, for a friend in BASIC using a COCO2. It used arrays for data storage and ran like a three legged donkey in deep mud.

My last foray into programming was working with another friend, he uses a Raspberry Pi, in developing a read/write programme for Morse code. I did the easy bit, text to Morse using the dictionary option of Python.

Thank you for your reply, it is always pleasant to hear from others over the ether.

Cheers,
Hal.

Basic Sinclair ZX81, then on Asmtrad 6128, following by machine language on same machine.
On work side it was Dbase II afair.

IBM 1401 Autocoder
This started in January 1964 at the IBM World Trade Data Centre in Wellington New Zealand. We used to book time in the middle of the night and would often patch in absolute using a hand card punch which punched one column at a time specifying the holes to be punched in the column.

What memories!
My first language was Sinclair Basic, coded in a ZX Spectrum.

I learned about logo reading in old magazines in my grandma's home, but my effort to make a logo-to-basic compiler only gave some result (not very similar to real logo) years after, programmed in Gw-Basic.

So my second programming language was sinclair assembler, coden into the machine by looking up hex codes one by one (luckyly, ZX Spectrum 48 included them in the nanual. Sinclair+ reference was more frienly but less informative.

I remember the arrival of a PC to my home as a great opportunity to learn new ways to program computers. The OS included a few tools able to make simple programm8ng, and most office applications had a rich macro languages.
After that, I learnt, in this order:
Ms-dos batch script
GW BASIC
Wordperfect 5 macro language
Wordperfect 5 printer definition language (along with proprinter escape codes. Do they count?)

I think I only tried to learn 8086 assembler after that, using debug to translate it into hex.

My first language was PL/1. It was in 1968 on an IBM 360/40.

My first programming language was Algol 60 on an English Electric Leo Marconi KDF-9. Date was around 1969.

G'day Warwick and Patrick,

My,my some names from the past coming up there, most of them long before I bought my Vic 20.

Good to hear from you both.

Hal.

My first programming language was Basic on the Sharp MZ21 computer, then c64 basic then Amos on Amiga and then C on Amiga.

Basic on CPM. I see there are a lot of us old timers here.

print("my first programming language was Python./nI was taught python my senior year of High School in 2008. /nI have programmed as a hobby ever since.")

I learned LOGO in elementary school, on one of their shiny-new Apple ][e machines! I ultimately learned to write a procedure to draw a circle, with any radius you like.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned it yet.

Sharp S-BASIC on the MZ721 Z80-based microcomputer (https://www.sharpmz.no/). And your trusty copy of Peeking and poking the Sharp MZ-700 by G P Ridley.

JavaScript emulator: https://takamin.github.io/mz700-js/emu.html

Fortran IV with WATFOR on an IBM 360 at my first computer class in college, maybe 1968 or 1969. Punch cards, take it to the center for processing...I loved it! And when I got my own first computer about 1980, a Color Computer from Radio Shack, the syntax of Basic was really quite similar to the Fortran I had learned. Some years later I discovered C, and that was all I have ever needed since then.

Remarkably, my first programming language was Bash scripting. I used to barely understand it. Now I know how the Bash shell works internally. So much has changed.

Shortly thereafter, I started learning C. This is my far, far preferred language today of them all, though I can write code in well over a dozen other languages, including (in no particular order):

• C++
• JavaScript
• Java
• Python
• Perl
• Tcl (including Tcl/Tk!)
• A few other shell scripting languages (including CSH)
• Several assembler languages
• A whole pile of others which I couldn't care to remember right now, sorry...

I've written interpreters for a few of those languages, just for fun...

I would like to alert you to the fact that the following:

...probably does not do what you want it to. You need backslashes ('\'), not forward slashes, before the 'n' if you want newline characters.

Just thought I'd let you know.