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What's your 1st programming language & What you use today?

Hey, Dev folks πŸ‘‹

What was the first programming language you learned?

And what are you using today?

Let's discuss how far we have come ....

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Top comments (67)

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oguimbal profile image
Olivier Guimbal • Edited

Somewhat in order, since ~2000, omitting front technologies (JS, html, etc):

  • VBA
  • C++
  • BlitzBasic (an old 3D game thing)
  • PHP
  • ActionScript
  • C#
  • Java
  • F#
  • Fortran (Masters in a research domain... this one hurts)
  • Python
  • Typescript (node+front+deno),
  • Clojure(script)
  • Purescript & Haskell

I still use today:

  • Typescript
  • Purescript & Haskell
  • Python
  • C#
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ombharatiya profile image
OM

Wow ... 2 decades of tech bath! You started the same year ECMAScripts's first stable version was launched. And things have changed like war in these 2 decades. Your journey must have been amazing!

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oguimbal profile image
Olivier Guimbal • Edited

Haha pretty much, yes :) Web technologies were mostly out of my radar until 2004 though (except for Flash).
It wrote code mostly for pleasure and student money back then, and I still have some code I wrote 15 years ago that I'm not very proud of :D
Professionally, I only used C++, C#, Python, Java, F#, JS/Typescript/node.

That said, I'm pretty sure the techs I listed would appear as "modern stuff" to some. Year 2k is not that far away !

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ombharatiya profile image
OM

You're talking about the time when there were no StackOverflow and good documentations, no YouTube tutorials. Great to e-meet you :)

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jennrmillerdev profile image
Jen Miller • Edited

no stackoverflow!?
how in the world were you guys able to center a div in a div? :)

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_hs_ profile image
HS

C++ was introduced to me by my fathers cousin. I currently hang on JVM stack with Kotlin, Java and Groovy.

But let's put it in some order:

  1. C++ at 13 just the basics like loops, variables... then BASIC (not visual one) at school
  2. PHP at 15 or later just to explore Joomla at that time (and of course JavaScript, SQL ...), and Pascal for school which I have no idea about right now
  3. C to check out what's different from C++ at 19 when going to college (starting to understand a bit more now)
  4. At the same time C# and Java - I knew about Java before and liked it but never tried it (the OO hell :D)
  5. PHP again - for a job this time
  6. Java for a Job
  7. C# and a bit of Node.js and Java for Android
  8. Java and a bit of Scala
  9. C# again with TypeScript(Angular) for front
  10. Java, Kotlin, Groovy, C#, Python (simple scripts), (Cyher - if SQL counts so does Neo4j language :D)

And of course besides of mandatory ones for job or school, played with VB as a kid, later Ruby and Go. Planing on checking out more languages like Rust just for fun. I would love to write my own language following "Nand to Tetris" just to get an overview of the things I'm missing at some places :D.

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Tomi Adenekan

Python was my first (not counting scratch πŸ˜‚). Python is what I use today.

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ombharatiya profile image
OM

Yeah, the same thing I was discussing with Sandor. It's a great language indeed.

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tominekan profile image
Tomi Adenekan

Exactly πŸ˜€

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metalmikester profile image
Michel Renaud

BASIC on the C64, then GW-BASIC on the PC. But it's with Turbo Pascal that I started getting more into it.

Nowadays it's largely C# and JavaScript.

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ferceg profile image
ferceg

Similarly, C64/C16/C+4 BASIC + assembly, then Turbo Pascal on PC, i386 assembly, C, C++, then Java, JS, PHP, C#.
Nowadays working mainly in PHP, learning Rust and Dart for fun and for widening my sight.

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metalmikester profile image
Michel Renaud

I also did some assembly on 8088 and SPARC, but just for fun (8088) and university (SPARC). That never amounted to anything but a frozen PC (8088 assembly) - lol. I forgot that I do have a web site that uses PHP. I rarely need to change the code these days. My stalled personal project is to rewrite it completely using ASP.NET Core.

I also did some COBOL and Modula-2, but never outside of school. I did some C++ and C++/CLI at work.

Definitely forgot a lot earlier. I guess my coffee is starting to kick in.

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ombharatiya profile image
OM

Yeah, I started learning Turbo Pascal as well in the very beginning. But later moved to Java Soon, due to its demand.

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metalmikester profile image
Michel Renaud

Java didn't come out until nearly 10 years later in my case. So there was some C, xBASE languages (dBASE III Plus, Clipper, FoxBase+/FoxPro) in the meantime. And SAS. I've never actually worked with Java.

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shaijut profile image
Shaiju T • Edited
  • Overview of C , C++ , Java and C# in College.
  • Java project in Internship.
  • Now C# in work. I like it because, C# is making developer life easier with tooling support of Visual Studio and VS Code.
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Sandor Dargo

If we don't count Logo, I started with Turbo Pascal. Today I mostly use C++ and Python.

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ombharatiya profile image
OM

Python really has come a long way. Nowadays I see folks starting with Python and staying Python forever.

And C++, unbeatable as always.

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Brian Foley

My first language was BASIC back in the late 80s. I'm not completely sure what version of BASIC it was, but I remember making text adventure games with my sister and father on our home PC and having a lot of fun doing it.

The first language I learned that I still use today is Javascript, which I learned when it was new in the mid-90s when I was in high school. Naturally, I use it for much different things nowadays.

The first language I learned "the right way" according to some snobs I've worked with through the years (meaning I learned it in a college classroom) was C++. I never really used it after leaving college but learning it definitely opened my eyes to how programming works under the hood.

The first language I learned that I fell in love with while learning it was Python, which I learned in the mid 00's. I still love using it today even though its not something I use at work (unfortunately). It's my daily driver for my home projects, despite a lot of my programmer friends thinking you should be using JS for everything!

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Filip ParyΕΌ

I started with HTML. It was fast and easy to see the results as I already had the browser installed. Then I found out about Arduino and met with C. Tried some C++ and desktop applications but my heart fell head first into embedded projects. Now I'm an embedded software developer and still use C and C++ with a little Python if needed.

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Andrei Dascalu

Counting only languages that I really learned to the point of writing useful stuff with it (listing those I learned for academic purposes separately)

First was BASIC (gw basic), then Pascal and Assembly (wrote lots of cheats for games), then Java and C++ (in University, but of the two I also used Java for a later job), Delphi and Bash script (also in university, but only Bash I used professionally), then JS and PHP (during university but outside of it, they became my main languages). Now I mainly use Go and I also dabble in Python and Rust

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Dalzon Charles-Hebert

C++ was my first language. I use JavaScript actually

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ombharatiya profile image
OM

Yeah, typically we start learning Data Structures in C++ and then in job we tend to work on the on-demand things.

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tichif profile image
Dalzon Charles-Hebert

Yes, you're right