ProgrammingThis forum is for all programming questions.
The question does not have to be directly related to Linux and any language is fair game.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
View Poll Results: What was your first programming language?
Distribution: openSUSE, Raspbian, Slackware. Previous: MacOS, Red Hat, Coherent, Consensys SVR4.2, Tru64, Solaris
Posts: 2,807
Rep:
Technically... it was supposed to be FORTRAN...
... but the Calculus professor who supposed to teach it had the idea that "Here's how you code a DO loop and here's how you use a WRITE statement... Now numerically integrate problems 10-15" was all we needed to be writing programs and was an effective way to teach programming to people who had never programmed before. As you can imagine is was an utter disaster.
I later took an experimental physics class that required a lot of number crunching. After the first week of class and spending that weekend in the student union guzzling coffee and madly attacking my calculator to compute means, variances, etc. on my calculator, I found a book in the bargain bin at the campus book store -- from the "Plaid" series of computer books (in the '70s) -- and holed up in the library in front of a computer terminal for a couple of evenings, typing in and debugged all the programs listed in it. I was then comfortable enough to tackle the fancier aspects of BASIC armed with a copy of Kemeny & Kurtz's `BASIC Programming' and could plow through the data collected in the physics lab. I did later become a go-to FORTRAN guy at work a few years later. No thanks to that Calc professor, though.
I still write a little FORTRAN -- oh, sorry, that's `Fortran' nowadays -- but haven't touched BASIC since playing around with it on Win386 many years ago. Good riddance to that.
I bought this at a used bookstore in Maryland, and it was the first language I wrote anything actually useful for. I wrote a tip calculator which I use on my pocket computer.
Where I worked in the early 70s, we had an HP 9100 or maybe 9800 desktop calculator lying around under-utilized. I taught myself to program it to make walking "Eat At Joes" sign on the display. Also same company built VERDIN airborne computers (for VLF submarine communications), I taught myself to program that in some kind of machine language.
First real computer programming language, APL on an IBM-370 with Selectric terminals using APL type balls. Circa 1974. Wrote a pretty basic word processor that saved papers, did left & right justification with variable space between words, and flat amazed English professors at junior college.
Funny story: When everyone at work got an IBM PC (Dual floppies, of course. Only managers got XTs) the guy in charge of the engineering group, a computer science grad, bought everyone a copy of MS-Pascal. The first thing all the engineers did was fill out purchase requests for FORTRAN compilers. When I left the company a couple of years later, there were still boxes of MS-Pascal sitting on bookshelves in offices. Still in the shrink-wrap.
Actually, I did do some BASIC on my Commodore 64 as a kid, but I never made anything useful. I got the FORTRAN book about 8 years ago. Fortunately the lessons in the book still work, with little modification.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.