My fellow coders, what was your first language?

40 comments

1. BASIC as well.

2. Java

3. ALGOL in 1971 + extra credit if we wrote same program in FORTRAN.

   Later came COBOL, PL/ M, C, C++, Basic, SQL (if you want to call it a language), Smalltalk and Java.

   Go out of the business in 2000.

4. Mechanical engineer here, so I’m not really a coder but I’ve messed around a bit.

   I played with arduino (dumb C++) and python a little bit in high school. In college I learned quite a bit of MATLAB as well more python and arduino stuff.

   Today I mostly just mess around in Octave (free open source MATLAB-compatible) and python.

5. Probably BASIC, but I was like 10 so not like I was doing anything crazy with it

6. Pascal (well, Turbo Pascal 5.5) in about ~2004 or so.

7. English.

8. About 1992-1995, I was in grade school and we learned BASIC programming. We never really learned enough to do anything cool, but I retained the foundational understanding of how computers think and function, which has helped as I’ve learned other languages.

9. Python in 2010 during high school.

10. My dad tried to make me learn Ruby in like 2006, but the first language I really learned was python in high school in 2011.

11. I am a network engineer and not really a coder. The first exposure was in the 90s.

12. TI-BASIC if you count playing around on a calculator, otherwise Java was the first language I learned seriously.

13. Whatever language they use on the TI-83 calculators we had in high school. As for popular languages, it was C.

14. Dartmouth Basic, in 1969.

15. Mine was html

16. I wouldn’t call myself a coder but I was interested in programing and web design when I was younger. I started with BASIC too in elementary school.

17. BASIC in 1982 when I was still in high school.

    Then Turbo Pascal. That language and its quick compiler seemed like a miracle then.

    Studied electrical engineering in college so the only language I was taught there was FORTRAN and later I learned 8088 assembler for my senior project. My partners did the hardware and I wrote all the firmware. I was hooked and once I graduated in 1987 I never worked in anything but software.

18. Logo, back in the day. Early 90’s, in some school computer class.

19. Pascal, in high school in the mid 90s.

20. JavaScript in 2014-2015. I decided I didn’t like making the browser do things and started using Python for data analysis instead and haven’t looked back.

21. Spanish, English, Python, Javascript, Go in that order

22. LOGO on an APPLE II in my elementary school computer lab.

    It was all downhill from there.

23. BASIC, –> Pascal, –> Ada

24. MatLab, when I was a math major in undergrad. Around 2010-ish. Although I never actually used it for anything outside of a couple of classes. The next one I learned after that was R (for statistics) in grad school, and I’ve used that one extensively.

25. Whatever Game Maker used back in 2010.

    Or, if you ask my mom, HTML.

26. Python, the language that can do anything – just kinda worse haha, I still remember modding those text adventure scripts for fun – and now I’ve been to jail twice, time flies man

27. C++

28. C# in a game design course

29. HTML if you consider it but if not java script

30. The first language I encountered was BASIC on my Commodore VIC 20. Though to be fair I was just copying source code out of the user manual.

    The first programs I wrote on my own used QBasic on my IBM XT.

    The first language I used to actually make anything useful was Java in college.

    Actually to be fair.. OP didn’t specify what kind of language so if you count HTML, I started that back in middle school.

31. Java I think. Don’t actually recall but it was like 7th grade. Did some cpp in college but didn’t study CS. Now I do a lot of Python and sql

32. Russian

    If you meant programming language C++

33. My first language (if you dont count goofing off with TI BASIC while in class) was MATLAB. As much as I hate it now, I still have a soft spot for it when it comes to plotting.

    Most of my work these days is in a combination of C++ and C, as I mostly work with high performance graphics/simulation stuff, and some flight software work. I’ll occasionally work in python but thats mostly to produce bindings to my libraries so it’s more accessible.

    I’ve experimented a bit with Rust in my spare time. It’s interesting and it’s improved a lot over the years but it’s not at a point where I’d switch to it for my work.

    I’ve dabbled in a ton other, but C++ is definitely my favorite. Especially now that we have modern cross platform package managers like vcpkg that make everything a lot less painful lol

34. I’m in biology and ecology so R, this year.

35. Pascal in 1996. It was what the AP Computer Science exam used at the time.

36. Freshman Computer class in the Fall of ‘79: We used ALGOL on punch cards.

37. Unix shell script (not really a language) but then Pearl.

38. BASIC

39. I don’t really consider myself a coder but back in the day I think the rough order of languages learned was: QBASIC, Visual Basic, Pascal, C++, PHP, Perl.

40. Technically Javascript.

    But the real answer is a big spaghetti website I wrote in PHP… and then rewrote in Javascript (ajax-type calls to a php server) after realizing how hard it was to maintain.

    I still think in Javascript.