Crumbs and a Poll [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

I need to put a computer in the kitchen to use on cold days. I can have one warm room in the house easily enough by heating a frozen pizza and making a cup of tea. I should run Ethernet cable there so I can check my mail without leaving the warm room.

The house that burned and the house next to it each have their front doors boarded up and big red stickers on 'em. I haven't gone to look at the writing, but I'm betting the red stickers mean there was enough damage that the houses had to be condemned.

I replied to a "computer-age old-timers poll" earlier, and one of the questions --well, more the replies to it -- surprised me: "What was the first programming language you learned? Can you still program in it?" I found it odd that folks might forget their first programming language, and even more odd when the language was BASIC. I haven't used old Microsoft BASIC in quite some time, but it's all still there. (If you count my first programming language as the one for the Litton desktop calculator with nixie tubes at my high school, I'd need a few minutes with the calculator in front of me for it to come back. But I'm pretty sure I haven't forgotten much of Hewlett Packard pocket calculator programming.) But now I'm wondering whether that notion is really as strange as it seems to me.

The first two questions are for pretty much anybody; the rest are for people who have learned at least one programming language.

[Poll #403267]

And if people want to suggest what languages ought to be listed in a "what was your first programming language" poll, feel free.

[*] "Run away!" and "Enough" represent the same magnitude for Skraelings (and possibly Bardoomen(sp?)), but they're not exactly synonyms. "Run away!" is used for a large number of bad things, such as skunks, foes, or survey questions, and "Enough" is a quantity, usually consisdered mythical or hypothetical, of Pop-Tarts, Goldfish crackers, or other yummies.

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my first language was LOGO, when I was 10. This was followed by BASIC when I was 11/12 (over the Christmas vacation in 1982 when I turned 12, and we got our Vic 20).

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Drat -- I forgot to include a question about the age at which folks learned their first programming language.

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Although you'd have to take into account generational differences. And ask for gender (people laughed at me when I asked for scientific toys; sometimes, my brother would get them despite his lack of interest, and I'd borrow them).

Skewing the data on purpose with your answers to questions #1 and #2?

Well my answer for one is no I don't think of HTML as a programming language cuz it's not written for a computer to read but rather a program already running on a computer to read, and then when I went to answer question two it occured to me that I could say the same thing about BASIC (or any other interpretted language), so I'd have to revise my opinion a bit. My complex answer would be that technically HTML is a programming language, but I'm reluctant to admit it and it would be a long time before I would come up with it as a candidate for a list of programming languages cuz my fetch all things in a category algorithm works differently than my look at a thing and decide which category it belongs in algorithm does.

I don't think of HTML as a programming language because it doesn't have control flow; I see it as a data format.

It's a little more than "a data format", despite not being a programming language. I guess, if I were pinned down on the matter, I'd have to describe it as ... a "markup language"? ;-)

Similarly, there have been other languages, for printing markup, described as "page description languages". So if someone calls it a "computer language", I have to cringe and say, "Okay, sort of," because it's a languag meant to be processed by a computer, but since it doesn't do anything (it only describes), it's not a programming language.

Now I'm wondering whether some of the people who refer to HTML as a programming language merely fail to distinguish between programming languages and anything else with a syntax that has to do with computers. Hmm. How to phrase a question to test that...

"Similarly, there have been other languages, for printing markup, described as "page description languages".

PostScript is a full-blown programming language, though I'm not crazy enough to actually try to program in it.

True, Postscript does go way beyond being merely a page description language. Variables, branches, loops, it's a programming language that just happens to have been designed for layout, not a mere markup language.

Which is *also* a programming language as well as a markup language. Donald Knuth has some amusing examples in the TeXBook.

if HTML is a language, then so is DOS Word Perfect with reveal codes on.

*nod* I agree, but I put that question in there because I saw more than one person list HTML as their first programming language in the survey I linked to, and wondered how widespread that attitude is.

I'd be asking another question about that set.

I bet that among people who know HTML and zero programming languages, HTML may count more often.

I also bet that among people who learned HTML before learning a programming language, there is a high incidence of JavaScript being the first programming language, but that this set of people may not make too much of that distinction.

My first programming language was APL. A long time ago. I haven't used it in over 20 years, and I'd rather sit down and learn something more modern/widely supported than relearn APL.

Which Skraelings do you have in mind, by the way? Presumably not the ones the Vikings met in Newfoundland.

Wow -- started with the language reported to be brain-warping!

I was thinking of the Markland tribe called Skraelings, not the historical people from whom they borrowed the name.

My first language was BASIC. I don't know what you mean by Skraeling counting; I said "more than two" (but not "many") because I'm counting fluencies, not short-lived exposures that didn't stick (hello APL :-) ). I was at one time quite fluent in LISP, and later acquired adequate knowledge of C, C++, and Java. (These have not all remained current.) I'm not a full-time programmer any more.

Skraeling counting started out as barbarian schtick and morphed into in-group jargon-ish usage; in practice, "more than two" translates to anywhere from "a few" to "a handful" ("I'm pretendingI can't count past two"), and "many" translates roughly to, "A bunch, too many to bother tallying up right this moment". "Run away!" can mean literally "too many", or "a lot; enough that if we were to give a number it'd be a round number and not an exact count".

So basically both you and

ckd came up with interpretations of the counting consistent with my expectations.

I welcome corrections to this explanation from actual (or former) Skraelings who happen to read this.

I went with "many" on the grounds that when you have to think about the count, it's become "many".

Day to day these days I mostly use Python, some Perl, hack C when necessary, some shell scripting...why, yes, I am a system administrator, why do you ask?

HTML is not a language -- if it doesn't have a control syntax or variables[*], it's not a programming language -- but even I must confess JavaScript is a language.

[* Am still greiving the loss of NN3's "entities".]

Yah, even without control structures, variables would be helpful in HTML. Moving to PHP helps some, but with my type of account I can't use PHP on my ISP's web server. (I do generate my pages from PHP sources before uploading them, which made a couple of things easier to manage, but I'm not getting the full benefits that PHP offers.)

P.S. "For this purpose, let's call C high-level." Very funny.

Old jokes aside, there are people who have seriously argued that C is, in important regards, a low-level language (though once it got ported off of DEC hardware, that claim got seriously weakened); but as an Algol-family language, the aspects of it that are relevant to this poll are the ones that it shares with other high-level languages. So I wanted to head off wise-asses who might otherwise be inclined to list C as low-level when filling in their answers here.

Making someone smile or growl at my phrasing was merely a pleasant side effect. [attempted innocent look]

I consider C a low-level language. I came at programming from the top-down. Anything which makes me aware of the actual metal and sand is "low-level" in my book.

Actually, at this point I *don't* really consider C to be "high-level". It's not assembler, to be sure, but it's a *big* step down from genuinely high-level languages like Haskell or anything in the ML family. Indeed, it's a pretty huge step down from even C# or Java.

C lives in the borderlands, IMO. It's high-level syntax, but it intentionally exposes a huge amount of the underlying guts of the machine so that you can fiddle with them. I'd say it's about equidistant between a good assembler and ML. So I do think the ambiguity is real...

Since I live in Macro-Land, I consider C to be quite low-level ("Pointers?! You mean to memory?!?!"). I understand the ambiguity -- I date a mainframe coder who speaks-to-metal. :)

HTML is not a programming language, it's a "markup language", duh. *grin* I think it helps that I was using nroff/troff's for document formatting long before I learned HTML, and dot commands don't constitute a programming language, either.

I am the "other" listed on High/Low question. The first programming language I had formally and *programmed* in *myself* was BASIC, but I was helping a little friend hack in assembler and machine code several years before then. For me it's like saying, "I can read X romance language, but I can't generate new text or speak in it." I still consider that some form of "learning" because I had, at that point, some ability to troubleshoot things that weren't working.

These days, I am almost *never* called upon to program, but I do sometimes end up in gigs where it's very helpful that I can understand C and C++ and COBOL and VB and a few other things. A few years back, my job was support third party developers implementing an ad-sharing SDK into their own apps. I *frequently* had these basement coders sending me snippets of implementation code and asking me "Why isn't it working?" and could figure that out more often than not without actually bothering a programmer. I consider that skill analogous to my ability to read end-user support email sent in a number of languages, like German, that I don't speak with any fluency. Even without interactive fluency, I read enough to be able to understand the problem and reply in English with the solution and a polite, "I'm sorry, we don't have support people who speak , can you write again in English?"

I find it a bit amusing that I now use HTML for the very things I used to use nroff for: quick markup of a text file to make it print (or email) prettily, add headers/bold/italics, or fix really bollixed line breaks so I can just read a story on my screen. Toss in some HTML, throw Lynx at it, and bang, it's done. Especially since my nroff is currently so rusty that I need a cheat-sheet for it, but my HTML chops are current.

Note that I never used troff. If I'd gotten used to relying on troff, I might have wound up learning TeX by now.

I was all set to say "high level" and "can still write in it like breathing", but the more I thought about it, the more I thought I really should count programmable calculators as my first programming language, not BASIC. I was startled to see how many people had already answered the poll by the time I'd made the first scan for typos and thought about putting in my own answers.

My first programming language was Recomp III machine language, learned in Jr. High when the machine was already obsolete. (so I never had a chance to program in it again)

Not an old timer. :)

While I know HTML isn't a language, I still think of it when languages come up. The next closest thing to programming I've done is VBA with Access. Other than that, nada.

For the poll, I used HTML as my "language".

I think what you're proving is that you have a lot of geeks on your list, so your poll is not a random sampling of the population ;)

If C is "high-level", what about LPC? That's my one. I was never very good at it but was good at making friends who were, and didn't mind helping me (or taking the project and making it do what I wanted it to do.)

If HTML is a programming language, add that and LaTEX to my list. I'm pretty darn good at WordPerfect, too.

And I got your Skraeling counting system!

I'm not sure about LaTeX, but I seem to recall that TeX was a full programming language -- I seem to recall Rhu Greene implementing Basic in TeX.

WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS had an awesome macro language, which was, indeed, a full-fledged language within the application-as-OS. I don't know that it had a name, but it is something I programmed in professionally.

I too have programmed professionally in the Word Perfect 4.2 macro language! And I don't think it had a name.

I remember using Word Perfect, Word Perfect Program Editor, and Word Perfect Macro Editor together. In a bubble-gum-and-string system (but it Did The Job, doggone it, and they were still using it a few years after the last time I touched it), I had dBase invoke a DOS batch file which called Macro Editor to edit a Macro Editor macro, when invoke it again with the new macro to edit a Word Perfect macro, and finally call Word Perfect with that macro.

I also used Program Editor macros to write most of a Pascal-to-C translator.

While simply "Word Perfect with 'reveal codes' on" is just markup like HTML is, I do consider macro languages contained in such things as Word Perfect 4.2 or Lotus Symphony to be programming languages if they can do more than simply record a sequence of keystrokes and play it back. Writing your own macros is programming; merely editing a document is ... merely editing a document.

I haven't gotten around to checking whether current incarnations of Word Perfect have a useful macro language. I used to make 4.2 jump through hoops backwards.

Well, my first language was 1802 machine code. I still remember the architecture, but all of the actual opcodes are gone, so I answered "Yes, but I'd want a cheat sheet/manual." Make sense?
Second was Microsoft Basic, and that's all still there.

Did you have an Elf?

Okay, I'm going to be intentionally contrarian. I answered "yes" -- I do think HTML is a programming language -- although in reality the question is much murkier than that.

The problem is, HTML doesn't live in isolation. The original language certainly wasn't a programming language, it was just a markup language. But nowadays it's a lot more than that. In particular, when you get into the relationship between HTML, DOM and Javascript, it gets very messy indeed. HTML doesn't have programming syntax per se, but it *does* encapsulate DOM, which *does* contain the triggers that control Javascript, which certainly *is* a programming language.

So while HTML isn't a full-fledged language itself, it's an integral component of a programming language ecology. Which leads me to my correct answer, which is "maybe, depending on definitions".

As for the rest: my first language was BASIC (on a PDP-8, I think), but honestly, I'd be hard-pressed to write a real program in it now. Not that modern "BASIC" bears any great resemblance to the language I learned, just to make things worse.

I think I fall into the "Enough" category. Using the Wikipedia list of languages as a crutch, I find that I've done serious programming in:

Basic (several dialects), Pascal*, Fortran*, Cobol*, Lisp (both Common and Emacs)*, Java*, Javascript (including the original Livescript)*, C#*, Ruby*, at least three different assemblers*, Prolog, SQL*, at least three different shells*, C*, C++*, Actionscript*, some horrible visual-programming language whose name I've forgotten*, Forth, Ada95*, E*, Logo, Progress 4GL*, dBase, and Scheme*.

Languages with an asterisk are ones I've programmed in for real paid work, as opposed to just play or personal use. And this doesn't include the ambiguous markup languages like HTML and VRML, nor other ambiguous cases like lex/yacc, nor the couple dozen other languages that I've studied but never written anything serious in.

Of the lot, my favorites are currently C# and Ruby -- respectively, the best compiled and scripting languages I've found. (Although Comega may eventually replace C#, and I really need to learn Caml.)

Yow. Y'know, that's the first time I've actually compiled the list. Drives home how much of a language geek I am...

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Cute Keith :-)

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And then there's TeX

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