I had that Usborne book back in the Before Times when ZX81s roamed the savannahs.
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It looks scarily familiar to me. If I didnāt have it, I had a different one in the series. And a full set of those Input magazines.
Add me to the list of people who write (or have written) software for a living, and canāt find their job on that very short professional list.
Basic, Modula-2, 68K assembler, PIC, Delphi, C,C++, then ended up working in Ada and an in-house safety critical language.
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At least 2 now
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Or Assembler. The second language I learned (after COBOL).
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Iām pretty sure that I had it too but my computers were 6502Cs.
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I canāt find FORTRAN in the list either.
My list is a bit different, and a lot of entries were semi-tinkering, semi-work, and a couple were school-only and my bar is low for including them in the listājust building 1 thing that actually worked (for one, it was āHello Worldā, lol). I wouldnāt say I āknowā too many of them, and I wouldnāt classify myself as a āgoodā or āgreatā programmer:
C
C++
C#
QBasic
Commodore BASIC
VB6
VB.Net
InstallScript
Perl
Python
PHP
VBScript
MS-SQL
MySQL
COBOL
JavaScript
ActionScript
Java
Powershell
Windows Shell
Linux Shell
x86 Assembly
BF
Ruby
FoxPro
For me, what keeps me gainfully employed in order of popularity is C#/VBScript/InstallScript/Powershell.
I suspect our two posts are going to start a measuring contest hereā¦ lol
EDIT: You should be shocked at how much VBScript makes the world go round in Windows land. A trader friend of mine mentioned once that when he got hired at a gig a few years back, they were managing 2 billion dollars worth of portfolio with Excel and VBScript.
EDIT: Forgot AutoIT. Easy to forget. Fun little language, though.
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Dunno if Usborne books made it over here, but I did have a programmerās guide to the Z80000 at one point, if that counts for anything (also one for the original ARM). Pretty ISA for the time, but Zilogās timing was off releasing the chip.
I canāt even find myself in the ābuild something for funā category. Where are ālaying the groundwork for the end of the worldā, āsummoning Great Old Ones or Outer Godsā, and āemulating unspeakable rites involving dead chickens, a trampoline and a jar of Vaseline on the system consoleā? No Forth? No APL? No APL implemented on a Forth stack machine? Tsk.
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What, no FORTRAN?
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Iām only 35!
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I know almost no one using perl in their day jobs these days. Python swallowed it.
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Seems to be the case. Been a long time since I had to look at it.
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Itās very odd. The first page doesnāt actually ask you what you want to do (with the possible exception of ābuild something funā). A better starting point is surely to know what problem youāre trying to solve. But I guess Iām thinking like someone who enjoys coding and problem solving, rather that CV writing.
If weāre playing lists: Logo, Pascal, BBC Basic (it was one of the better ones, back in the day), 6502 assembly, Fortran 77, 68HC11 assembly (and direct machine code, assembled with a pen and paper), Matlab, C++, a brief look at Lisp and Prolog (I never felt happy with that one), C, PIC assembly, and most recently VBA (makes me feel dirty) and Python. Python covers almost everything now, from dumb scripting jobs to scientific simulations, with a bit of C++ if I need more speed.
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Iām 37 and I was taught it in high school!
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Ah. I went to public school.
(So if Iād taken a class, it would have been Pascal I think)
I worked in 1979 with a grad student who couldnāt get the floppy-based development system to work reliably, so instead he coded his big Z80 application in raw hexadecimal machine language, programmed into EPROMs one subroutine at a time. I got to convert his notebooks of hand-written opcodes into .asm files the next year. Whee!
But I seem to use nothing but C and PIC assembly these days.
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Thatād be PHP, sir.
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Another great thing about javascript is you can go to tons of webpages, hut CTRL+U and see lots and lots of examples of things in action. I learned javascript from Cookie Clicker, Kittens Game, Sandcastle Builder and others. For me, being able to find a chunk of code that does something and then mess around with it until you understand how it does that thing is a great way to learn. (That being said, please, please, please donāt look at my code, itās embarrassing).
ETA: When Iām coding Iām constantly worried about how inefficient Iām being, but then I tell the browser to run my code at x1000 speed and everything works fine. This is nothing like coding on a C64, you can just spew processor time at every problem.
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I want to gloss over my lack of content and obfuscate the two-bit information pieces that I have by wrapping them in a tacky animation with token interactivity. My language is JavaScript.
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Ugh, it keeps giving me Java. Static typing is for nerds.
(says the clojure developer)
