ALGOL-60 at Berkeley in Fall 1964

Technically, while in Navy electronics "A" school, we had to learn the assembly language of the computer trainer we had, in order to write a simple program on it. I don't even remember the name of that computer trainer, or what microprocessor it used. That said, I dumped that knowledge as soon as I finished that module. The first programming language that I seriously learned was BASIC, on a DEC PDP-11/780, in 1982.

Algol-60 in the mid 60s at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. Djikstra himself came to give us a two afternoon tutorial in the library introducing us to recursive functions for instance. Fell in love with it and bitterly regretted the switch to Fortran IV of all things a few years later.

My very first computer was the first Danish electronic computer DASK. I programmed it in assembly language (which we called machine language) in 1959. My next language was Algol60, which was taught by Peter Naur who used his drafts for the Algol60 report as handouts. Algol was followed by Pascal, neither of which are mentioned as options in this survey.

Pascal anybody?

When I was in college in the mid-80's, Pascal was the first "serious" language that computer science students would take at the university.

When I was in the sixth form (about 1978) we went to Nescot (North East Surrey College of Technology, which still exists and didn't get turned into a university) after school and programmed a Varian computer in a language called Tasc. I haven't heard of either since.

Pascal was my second and Fortran the third languages.

To be more specific, my first programming language was K&R C, and I learned by reading the language specification.

Also, you can get honest Object Oriented behavior, even inheritance, in K&R C. C++ makes it easier to do these things, but I learned to do it on a dare! in K&R C.

FOCAL - Formula Calculator. FOCAL was a DEC creation that was stripped down from an earlier language and made small enough to fit into the memory of a 4K machine (PDP-8 in this case) and still have enough memory left over for a program. It was interpreted, had line numbers, issued error messages in the form of "6.56 @ 1.10" (error 6.56 (read the manual) at line 1.10). Terminal input (tty of course!) was done with an ASK command. It had computed goto's:

IF (A-B) 1.10, 1.50, 2.1

means that if (a-b) is negative, goto 1.1; zero (equal) goto 1.50, positive goto 2.1. After that experience, and learning 370 assembler a few years later, it was really hard to drop "goto" from my logical lexicon. But FOCAL was a fun language to learn as an introductory experience in seventh grade.

Also ... no love for PL/I ?

FORTRAN, COBOL second, Basic and dBase about the same time third.

ADA? We had at least one programmer with an interest.

Missing entries:
Occam - parallel processing for transputers - though it is doubtful if that were the first for anybody.

The first language I learned was Fortran. The first I learned and used was Cobol.