First Programming Language?

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DementedPurple
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First Programming Language?

Post by DementedPurple »

I thought it would be fun to learn about everyone's roots in programming, so I made this forum, anyway, here's mine, feel free to respond with yours. My first programming language was scratch.mit.edu. It is a block programming language and how I learned was when I was 7 years old, my school had people from SparkFun teach us how to code. I was little and thought that coding was one of the coolest things because of the matrix and what not. But only a few kids could be part of this demonstration, and if you wanted to, you had to write a paper on why they should chose you, and I wrote "Because I know binary" (I kind of lied when I said that, all I did was read about ascii in a book) And I got in. Surprisingly enough, these people didn't have much experience with programming themselves, because they didn't even mention variables :lol: (Probably because we were only in 2nd grade and that was a future math concept) And basically, I just dragged blocks and made programs that way.
lidnariq
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by lidnariq »

BASIC on a VIC-20 or Logo on an Apple 2e. I'm not entirely certain which.
tepples
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by tepples »

Logo on Apple IIe, then BASIC on Apple IIe, then HyperTalk on a Mac, then assembly language on Apple IIe, then C on a Mac (briefly), then QBasic on an MS-DOS PC, then Turbo C (briefly) and DJGPP on an MS-DOS PC, then assembly language on NES, then C++, Scheme (briefly), Java (briefly), JavaScript, PHP, and Python on a Windows PC, then WarioWare DIY (Nintendo's attempt at making Scratch, I guess) on Nintendo DS.
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GradualGames
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by GradualGames »

That's fun you started with Scratch; so did my nephew. He's on to Pico-8 now :). I started with QBasic in 1996 or so, at age 13.
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tokumaru
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by tokumaru »

GradualGames wrote:I started with QBasic in 1996 or so, at age 13.
It appears we're the same age and started programming around the same time using the same tool, because my answer is EXACTLY the same.
Garth
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by Garth »

My first exposure to programming was Fortran IV in college in 1978, but no useful depth yet. My first real programming was on a TI-58c calculator starting in Dec '81, followed soon after by 6502 in a class in the spring of '82, concurrent with a Fortran IV class.
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
DementedPurple
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by DementedPurple »

Garth wrote:My first exposure to programming was Fortran IV in college in 1978, but no useful depth yet. My first real programming was on a TI-58c calculator starting in Dec '81, followed soon after by 6502 in a class in the spring of '82, concurrent with a Fortran IV class.
Wow. What computer did you use for Fortran IV, I know that computers like the Apple II and Commodore PET existed, but did you have to use a computer the size of a room?
DementedPurple
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by DementedPurple »

GradualGames wrote:That's fun you started with Scratch; so did my nephew. He's on to Pico-8 now :). I started with QBasic in 1996 or so, at age 13.
Yeah, I loved scratch, at one point I tried programming a full fledged RPG using that language. sadly, Scratch just wasn't up to the task. It was extremely laggy, and it often times crashed my browser. But it was still a good language to get me started with programming. I remember when I came up with how to use variables on my own, it went like this: I wanted to have money in the game. And then I remembered about these things called variables and thought, "What if I had a variable for how much money I have" And sure enough, it worked. I could go on about this story, but it's probably pretty boring so I'll just stop there.
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NovaSquirrel
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by NovaSquirrel »

I started out playing with The Games Factory's event-based programming, and then learned Liberty BASIC after that, and C after that. I was actually exposed to Pokemon Mini's architecture (S1C88) before I played with the 6502.
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Gilbert
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by Gilbert »

1. Logo in some elementary summer course. Didn't know whether the centre used Apple ][ or any other computers bitd.
2. BASIC in some elementary summer course on PC-88.
3. BASIC on Apple ][, via reading books and experimenting at home.
4. Basic (heh) 6502 assembly on Apple ][ (via reading books, that never worked out). I also managed to learn why most of my graphics hacks of FDS games usually only worked on Side A but not Side B, to no avail, partly due to the disassembly tool I had at the time using awkward mnemonics for the 6502 opcodes, such as using JZ instead of BEQ (and I eventually found out more than two decades later that the reason the hacks not working was because of hidden last files on the disk).
5. dBase in some elementary summer course... yeah.
6. VERY basic Pascal in University.
7. VERY BASIC C++ in University.
8. VERY BASIC COBOL in University.
9. AGS.
10. Some x86 assembly.
11. Revisited 6502 assembly, so I could finally make something that seemed to work on Apple ][ and Famicom.
12. Revisited C++.
And more of those other languages that I had dipped a bit into but not quite using.

I wasn't meant to post all these. Just that I'd want to say that I had previously touched COBOL. I WISH THAT NEVER HAPPENED!1!

...yeah. All these BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINE and CAPS are necessary.
Rahsennor
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by Rahsennor »

I also started with QBASIC in the mid-90s, around the age of 7. That's the age I started coding - I was staring at books on BASIC since before I could read. I can legitimately call myself a native programmer. :shock:

I quickly migrated to Turbo C++ and then flat assembler (x86), which I used to write a Forth OS, before DOS died and I drifted away from programming for a few years. After I switched from Windows to Linux I picked up GCC, which I've been using ever since.

Plus a bit of Java for a Minecraft mod I never published, back when it was still a decent game.
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by FrankenGraphics »

My grandma exposed me to FORTRAN and COBOL but only had the means to show me the concept, she had a box full of programming sheets and we sat and wrote in them with no computer to test it on. I'm sure i never did anything useful but it sparked my interest. After that summer, i borrowed every book on BASIC at the library and read them and copied example code to paper and began to write small programs on the same. Those books were for ABC80, ABC800 and Commodore 64.

I then got a 286 with qBasic off the trash bin at mothers' work and finally got to program on an actual computer. Learned how to make batch files by this time too. qBasic is the first language i got to properly learn.

My grandma got me a subscription of a webdev magazine by christmas '96 which was my primary source for learning HTML and JS.
calima
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by calima »

Qbasic at age 7, IIRC.
Oziphantom
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by Oziphantom »

1988 BASIC V2 - C64 was my first. I also got LOGO that year, but LOGO not that useful for things.
1990 6502
1998 68K/65816 as well
1999 x86
2000 C/C++
2005 I also picked up C#
93143
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Re: First Programming Language?

Post by 93143 »

I did a bit of some type of BASIC in a high school computer course in the mid-'90s. Didn't really grab me. It seemed too high-level, like it was hiding the details of how the computer worked from me, and I found it vaguely annoying.

I had to learn C++ in college as part of my first year of engineering. But only the first year. After that it was several years of nothing but Matlab. I only got back into C++ at the beginning of my Ph.D., and I still like Matlab better.

I never seriously considered learning any sort of assembly language before the spring of '14, when I started my current SNES project. In fact, my first thought was to ask somebody on NESdev to program the game for me, but I abandoned that idea as a likely lead balloon...
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