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Matthew D. Miller
Matthew D. Miller

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What was the first programming language you fell in love with?

The question of favorite programming language and different variations on that question has been asked dozens of times. This one is a little different. What I'm interested in is not what language you love (feel free to share that too) but was it the first language you learned or your 23rd?

I recently reflected on choosing the right tool for the job. In that post, I explained Perl is the language I first fell in love with, and it's still my go-to language. Perl was my first programming language. Kind of. I learned JavaScript first, but those were the days before Node, so I considered JavaScript more of a browser tool like HTML and CSS. Perl was the first language I learned that I could actually do stuff outside the browser with.

Is there something about your first language that always holds a special place in your heart? Or did it take you several languages before you found the one that clicked for you? Did you have a language that you fell in love with that was later replaced by another language you liked even better? Have you not found that language yet?

Top comments (7)

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torpne profile image
Kevin McKenna • Edited

AMOS BASIC on the commodore Amiga was my first. First time I ever made a finished product and never really looked back.

As I got a little older and the Amiga died off I ended up using visual basic 6 for work. From there I've gone through vb.net, c# and JavaScript, but recently started on Java and find myself enjoying it a lot more.

As a fellow (former) dba, have to give a special shout-out to SQL, maybe more of an honorable mention for 'programming language' I suppose, but definitely where I feel most comfortable with the day to day stuff.

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Nikola Stojaković

My first programming language was C++ but I never returned back to it. I experimented with lot of languages as a beginner before moving to web development and combination of PHP / JavaScript / Ruby (occasionally), but out of languages I have used so far I can say that Rust is the one I liked most.

I think there are few reasons for that:

  • Rust is statically typed language which helps me to right away eliminate lots of potential bugs in the program.
  • It allows me to do pretty much everything I can do in C++ but mostly in a few different ways and not in thousands of different ways (I can follow some well established convention when I develop my application).
  • It has a rich type system and ownership model which guarantees both memory and thread-safety .
  • I don't know why but I just like it's syntax.

Beside that I don't have some language I fell in love with - I try not to get too emotional about technologies I use but rather choose ones depending on the project (or feature) I'm working on.

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John Alcher

Is there something about your first language that always holds a special place in your heart?

The first code that I ever wrote was in Java. Your first "hello world" will always be special!

... Or did it take you several languages before you found the one that clicked for you?

Definitely. I was pretty much copy pasting code at that time, and Java's verbosity doesn't help either as a beginner. It was months of shuffling between Python, Ruby, and JavaScript before I understood what I'm doing. And then it took about a year and a half before I found PHP, which I guess I can consider as the one I "loved".

Did you have a language that you fell in love with that was later replaced by another language you liked even better?

I absolutely adore Python, but duck typing is something that outgrew me pretty quickly. PHP7 gave me the right balance with its OOP model and type-hinting. Never looked back!

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Victor A. Barzana • Edited

I started with Delphi 5 back in 2001, then C#, PHP, Java, until I met JavaScript and stayed forever :)

Is there something about your first language that always holds a special place in your heart?

Yes I was copying everything in my notebook things like. color dialog.color() hahaha it was pretty fun.

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Diogo Canut

My first hello world was written in C. I still love C, but when I saw haskell
and lisp for the first time I got attracted to it. My top 3 languages are:

Haskell
Python
C

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prajapatgautam1999 profile image
Gautam Prajapat

C#

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AhmadDeel

C++