Good point.

Maybe LQ regulars are an ageing group. (Bit too old for Logo as a first language).

AP

Yes it is. I have a whole little project written in bash. http://sourceforge.net/projects/duplexpr/

If you want to learn a new language, I'd suggest learning awk. It's pretty easy to get started and comes in very handy in bash scripts. You can get a lot of mileage out of it by just learning a few basics. Where it really shines is when you want to process some textual data and need to consider the context around what you are trying to find/change. You can do that sort of thing in sed, but it's orders of magnitude more difficult to code and debug sed.

3583 Bytes Free
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I had a VIC= 20 at home and limited access to a TRS-80 at school. I wrote my own rudimentary two pass 6502 symbolic assembler in BASIC for the VIC, Reading and poking machine code values into memory from DATA statements wasn't much fun.

A few years later I moved up to a ACORN/BBC Model B, which had 32K, and a really nice BASIC: with labels, named procedures, an inline assembler, and no need for those pesky line numbers any more!

My first exposure to C was also on the Model B, from an introductory series of articles in issues of BEEBUG magazine. My first exposure to LOGO/Turtle Graphics was also on the Beeb around that time.

Lots of other languages on various platforms have come and gone in varying degrees in my life since, but those 6502 days were special, and had a lasting impact.

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in #226
FoxPro had a language too. I have used 2.6.
Around 2.6 onwards it was taken over by M$.
AFAIR you could even program it to handle genuine multiuser concurrency (rlock, flock ..).
OK

What an interesting read!

Assembler for the Motorola 68000 was my first - the company that trained me believed it was a good starting point but COBOL, FORTRAN and PL/1 were the languages they made money from so they came next. It was IBM 360's from smart terminals, down tie lines, or a mini (HP 3000 ?) carefully guarded by a sysadmin; all of which I found tedious. Fortunately they turned me loose on the early PCs (1982 maybe) using TurboPascal. The only wait time was rebooting after I crashed the system so i could hack away to my hearts content.

The scope of what's out there is rather substantial. From BBX ( Business BASIC eXtended ) to bs, more or less a combination of BASIC and SNOBOL.

I loved programming, but I had too many irons in the fire to learn more than Basic. I owned a Printing Company and repaired the copiers and was the only Graphic Artist. I also had a side gig building and maintaining computers and networks for others. By the time I had time to learn, I was only writing Excel Programs. The life path I was on was not conducive to changes.

My first programming language was FORTRAN. IV, precisely.
I began learning it from my father's books perhaps 15 yo, 1973. There was no computer course at school. Computers were just something from science fiction, not for common humans and of course not for children!
FORTRAN was the first (and only) language I learned at class, a few years later at university during my engineering studies. I had no access to the computer itself. I had to punch my code on cards using one of the old style machines at the university (one character at the time, and restarting on a new card in case of error! ). There was a modern luxurious punching machine too, with a 1-line screen where you could compose the entire line (80 characters) and check it before having it punched on card; this machine was reserved for those who worked on special semester projects involving use of the computer, not for daily or weekly exercises. I had to drop the card pack into the operator's bin. The operator ran programs by reading cards, sending jobs to the computer and receiving output to print on the big drum printer on wide perforated continuous paper sheets. The computer was a Univac belonging to some public administration (a ministry, I think).

The usual output was 2-page long: one for the program code and another one for the results. As I was quite fluent on programming, I didn't stay to the exercises given by the professor. I managed to find and modify a routine to calculate and print an annual calendar for a given year. Most of the code however was for printing in very big numbers the year. I liked it, so I did send it several times, for 25-30 years, till I got a note from the operator to not send that program another time

My second language was BASIC on a WANG 8-bit microcomputer that belonged to a university laboratory. It had 16 KB ram and one or two cassette tape drives for program and data storage. No hard drive, no floppy drive. A superb strong keyboard with special keys for the commands. I used this system during 7-8 months for my final thesis. It was rather easy for me to learn BASIC.

Next step, another BASIC at Grenoble university, France, for my postgraduate and PHD years. I had access to a Apple ][+ computer, 8-bit 6502 microprocessor, 48 KB RAM, 2 floppy drives 5 1/4 in, green display. I soon discovered the 6502 assembler (LISA or "Laser Interactive Symbolic Assembler") and used it, mostly for my own distraction. However I was able to rescue a colleague when his floppy disk with big part of his project was somehow damaged: I was able to recover his files. The second Apple purchased was a Apple ][e, with orange display and an added Z80 card with 64 KB ram. I could boot that processor instead of 6502 and run Fortran, Pascal and other languages.

In the 80s I was interested in many other languages and found lots of books at the university's library: Pascal, C, Logo, Prolog, Ada, Cobol, PL/1, Forth, 6800 & 8086/8088 assembler etc. I only learned a little Pascal and some more C. On IBM compatible computers, I did use Turbo C 2, GWBASIC under msdos 3.3, microsoft Basic and Fortran, and some Lisp within the autocad software. I didn't write programs for years, and now I plan to come back, probably with Python.

I wanted to put Atari Basic, but when I saw the options, I remembered that, 10 years before, I'd had to learn assembly language in the Navy.

I can't believe how many put Fortran. I looked at that in the Navy, too, but didn't really have a need for it.

Atari Basic was great, though!

I did some basic on Atari ST. Don't remember the specifics of the version though. It was sometime in the 80s I guess. I liked ot a lot - I liked the ST as well!

While I did not start pgming with Logo, I do think it has a compelling model. I am very impressed how an amusement/learning language for children is also (StarLogo, NetLogo,...) a valuable construct for scientific simulations. The limitations for counts of turtles, patches, etc. was why I did not continue using it for much but at one time I had a very entertaining simulation of 2D bubbles which you could distort and watch equilibrium re-establish itself. Most Logo programs I have read fall victim to the programmer making too many concessions to requiring global variables and global processes. Most of life(physical reality) really depends on nearest neighbors exclusively rather than any global knowledge or calculation. Logo remains a great place to teach that differentiation is really subtraction and integration is really just addition. Nature is fields of values and neighbor to neighbor interactions, not global calculation and closed form solutions to differentials and integrals. Almost no one really understands how profound this realization actually is. Logo makes it more teachable and therefore gets my enthusiastic kudos as worthwhile for anyone who needs in-depth understanding of natural mechanisms. Logo presents hope that humans can make productive use of those strengths of computing machinery which most dramatically contrast with the strengths of people.
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thewildotter

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My first programming language was Algol 60 which was taught at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich with punch cards.

It was FORTRAN/WATFOR/WATFIV. Had to use punch cards.

One thing to consider when choosing between awk and sed -- awk has a line length limit, sed does not. (That is important to me in some scripts I write to sort, essentially, mbox files.)

In 1966 I was working as an operator in a punched card based operation around an IBM 1400 computer at a life insurance company.
I signed up for a night school course, cost $20, where we learnt how to program an IBM 1130 using assembler. Best investment I ever made. The instructor hired two of his students as programmers at the board of education where we wrote business programs for an IBM 360/30.
It was a rigorous introduction to flow charts, logic, careful coding and thorough testing.