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Discussion on: How many programming languages do you know?

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StevePitts

I'm not sure that I agree that everything mentioned in this discussion falls under 'programming languages' but I'll define 'know' as meaning a language that I understand (or in some cases, understood) well enough to either make a living from (ie. poeple paid me to work with that language) or produce tools used by others. In roughly chronological order of first picking up the language:

Basic (on a PDP machine at a technical college in 1976/77 - no computers at home or school back then)
JCL (if HTML is a programming language, then so is IBM's Job Control Language)
FORTRAN
APL
VS BASIC (IBM mainframe variant)
INFO (probably the most obscure entry on this list, a 4GL from Doric)
EXEC2 (old IBM mainframe scripting language)
BAL/HLASM (IBM mainframe assembler)
BCPL
ST Basic/Fast Basic (on an Atari ST)
ANSI C
REXX
Motorola 68000 assembler
Superbase BASIC (SBL)
COBOL
FOCUS
PL/1
Windows batch files (especially the dialect used by Take Command and predecessors)
HTML
LotusScript (in the Lotus Domino/Notes context)
Javascript
VBA (primarily under Excel)
C++
ASP.NET/VB.NET
PHP
Easytrieve Plus
SQL
Python

There are at least seven variants of Basic in that list, and apart from APL (which I haven't used in more than 30 years) most of the languages are procedural and I would anticipate being able to make sense of a program written in that language if it was put in front of me.

Of the above I still write in REXX/SBL/HTML/PHP/SQL for leisure activities, write Python/REXX and read C/COBOL/PLI/JCL/SQL for work. REXX has been my favoured tool for 'quick and dirty' programs for more than 30 years and I'm currently trying to get my head around Rust as a possible replacement for C in situations where performance is more important than the elapsed time to something usable.