Taking the bull by its horns [was background]

[Tom Copeland]

male 21y

bg: BASIC on commodore plus4 when I was 6-8yrs old, QBASIC 10-12yrs old,
later Python,Perl,Java,C,C++,Ruby,C# in order (with dabblings in
others such as Haskell)

wk: freelance developer, mostly ruport/camping/rails in order.
freelance tech writing, too.

location: currently nomadic between (Naugatuck|New Haven), CT and NYC
soon semi-permanent residence in New Haven! (By September)

m35y
bg: BASIC on TRS-80, assembler on C-64. C, Java, C++, SQL, Ruby.
wk: Rails and whatever else Rich Kilmer tells me to do.
location: Northern VA

Tom

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I hope there's some kind of prize for the person who's been doing this
the longest ... it just might be me.

Male, started programming as an undergraduate on ILLIAC I and an IBM 650
in 1961. Later moved on to IBM 7094, IBM 1620, IBM 1130, CDC 1604, CDC
924, Sigma 9, Floating Point Systems array processors, Prime 850, VAX
11/780s, miscellaneous Unix servers and Linux. Languages: mostly
assembler and FORTRAN until 1992, at which point I learned "awk" and
Perl 4. I never did learn enough C to do it professionally and don't
plan to. The current languages are Perl 5 and R. At work I'm a
performance engineer.

Now the hobby stuff: I've had my own computer since the Altair 680B
days, and I still have every computer I ever owned *except* the
Commodore 64, which I donated to a charity rummage sale in 1990.
Languages: Perl, Forth, Lisp/Scheme, R, Ruby and soon Erlang.
Applications: quantitative finance, algorithmic composition and
synthesis of music, general scientific and statistical computing, and
analytic performance models.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

male, 70, retired programmer (after 46 years of working at it)
location: Ann Arbor, MI, USA
background: aerospace applications, communication systems, GUI design
and implementation
languages: (ranked by preference)
-1 Basic, C++, AppleScript
0 FORTRAN, PL/I, C, Forth, Java, Object Pascal
+1 Objective C, Smalltalk/V, Common Lisp/CLOS
+2 Logo, Eiffel, Scheme, Ruby

Also lots of assembler, especially early on. And a fair amount of work
with Mathematica (+2) but I'm not sure it should be counted as a
programming language (although it certainly contains one).

Regards, Morton

Dang ... someone beat me out for "doing it the longest". Not by much,
though.

I suppose I should rate languages too then.

Best: Forth, Lisp/Scheme, Ruby, R, Derive, Axiom, Erlang
Mediocre: Assembler, FORTRAN, Pascal, MATLAB
Worst: C, C++, Java, BASIC, Perl

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Ok I'll put my cards on the table
male 45y
bg: Pascal (who's laughing?) Ada83, perl, python [ I only chose the
languages that influenced me, so I left C, bash and awk away ]
wk: Sys and netadmin Arrggg
location: Paris/France

male 34 seattle wa

bg (chrono): logo, basic, hypercard, forth, pascal, c, object pascal,
modula-2, smalltalk (finally fell in love with a language),

The only language I ever truly fell in love with was Lisp 1.5. It's been
downhill ever since.

 

[John Carter]

The only language I ever truly fell in love with was Lisp 1.5. It's been
downhill ever since.

Well, it was the lisp in lisp interpreter in the original Mcarthy book
that I fell in love with. (No, you can't have my copy)

However the joy in Joy interpreter trumps even that.
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy/jp-joyjoy.html

Ps: Your taste is Impeccable Sir.






John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : (e-mail address removed)
New Zealand

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Well, it was the lisp in lisp interpreter in the original Mcarthy book
that I fell in love with. (No, you can't have my copy)

However the joy in Joy interpreter trumps even that.
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy/jp-joyjoy.html

Ps: Your taste is Impeccable Sir.






John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : (e-mail address removed)
New Zealand

I do have the MIT Press Lisp 1.5 manual and McCarthy's two papers on
Lisp. I more or less don't like Common Lisp -- it's just too bloated. So
I think I'm more a Schemer now.

 

[Martin DeMello]

I do have the MIT Press Lisp 1.5 manual and McCarthy's two papers on
Lisp. I more or less don't like Common Lisp -- it's just too bloated. So
I think I'm more a Schemer now.

Which dialect? I've gotten into Chicken lately and it's very pleasant to use.

martin

 

[Damjan Rems]

Male 43years
Begin with basic on C64
My first job was IBM-S3 and RPG II, continued to IBM AS400 RPG 400, CL.
Learned about PC started with Turbo Pascal then Clipper, some REXX on
OS/2.
After that Lotus Notes and Java.
Curently working as a system administrator and Ruby rocks for everyday
scripting.
Location:Slovenia, on the sunny side of the Alps.

by
TheR

 

[Michael Ulm]

male, 40y
PhD in mathematics, working on applications of AI
languages I used by preference:
-1 Basic
0 Pascal
+1 Assembler, C
+2 Ruby, C++ (yes, I know I'm weird)
location: just south of Vienna, Austria

 

[Alex Young]

Might as well chuck my hat in here...

male 28y
bg (in strict chronological order): Sinclair BASIC (still got my ZX
Spectrum+ somewhere); Z80 assembler; Commodore BASIC (still got my C64
somewhere); C; ARM assembler (on an ARM3, then ARM4 - still my favourite
instruction set *ever*); Delphi (taught at college, still pine for the
GUI designer); Perl, PHP, SQL (to pay my way *through* said college);
Java; Python; Ruby; C#; C++
wk: web apps, custom search engines, document classification, 3D
modeling plugins, volumetric data presentation
location: London, UK

 

[Robert Dober]

And how much did you add in *your* age? ;-) I wish I had

robert

 

[Robert Klemme]

I wish I had

Uh, oh *cough cough* I'm sorry. )

robert

 

[Andreas Schwarz]

- 23y
- Germany
- work: EE student, admin of my website http://www.mikrocontroller.net
- started with QBASIC, GFA Basic
- use: C, Assembler, PHP, Ruby, Matlab, VHDL
- tried out: Perl, Lisp, awk, Java, C++
- have made a few attempts with functional languages (Erlang, Ocaml),
but didn't get very far because I didn't really have a use for them

 

[Dido Sevilla]

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QVNJQywgNjUwMiBhc3NlbWJsZXIsCng4NiBhc3NlbWJsZXIsIEMgb24gTVMtRE9TLCBvZmYgdG8g
QyBvbiBTb2xhcmlzIGFuZCBHTlUvTGludXgsIHRvZGF5CmRvaW5nIGxvdHMgYW5kIGxvdHMgb2Yg
UnVieSB3b3JrLCBPQ2FtbCwgTGlzcCwgT2JqZWN0aXZlLUMsIGFuZCBhCmxpdHRsZSBKYXZhIG9u
IHRoZSBzaWRlLgp3b3JrOiBlbnRlcnByaXNlIGFwcGxpY2F0aW9ucywgd2ViIGFwcGxpY2F0aW9u
cywgZGlzdHJpYnV0ZWQgc3lzdGVtcwpsb2NhdGlvbjogTWFuaWxhLCBQaGlsaXBwaW5lcwoKLS0g
CuaZrumAmuOBmOOCg+OBquOBhOOBruOBjOW9k+eEtuOBquOCieetlOOBiOOCi+engeOBr+S9leOB
jOOBp+OBjeOCi++8nwrmma7pgJrjgafjgoLmma7pgJrjgZjjgoPjgarjgY/jgabmhJ/jgZjjgovj
gb7jgb7mhJ/jgZjjgovjgZPjgajjgaDjgZHjgpLjgZnjgovjgojvvIEKaHR0cDovL3N0b3Jtd3ly
bS5ibG9nc3BvdC5jb20K

 

[Robert Dober]

A first r=E9sum=E9:


vg age: 34.3125
Avg sex: 0.00*female + 1.00*male
cpp ... 12 70.59%
c ... 11 64.71%
java ... 9 52.94%
basic ... 9 52.94%
python ... 7 41.18%
pascal ... 6 35.29%
sql ... 6 35.29%
perl ... 5 29.41%
lisp ... 5 29.41%
csq ... 4 23.53%
scheme ... 4 23.53%
assembler ... 3 17.65%
obj_c ... 3 17.65%
php ... 3 17.65%
bash ... 3 17.65%
smalltalk ... 3 17.65%
logo ... 2 11.76%
awk ... 2 11.76%
haskell ... 2 11.76%
obj_pascal ... 2 11.76%
apple_script ... 2 11.76%
forth ... 2 11.76%
fortran ... 2 11.76%
R ... 1 5.88%
joy ... 1 5.88%
turing ... 1 5.88%
neko ... 1 5.88%
ada ... 1 5.88%
algol ... 1 5.88%
hypercard ... 1 5.88%
clos ... 1 5.88%
dcl ... 1 5.88%
erlang ... 1 5.88%
prolog ... 1 5.88%
sm ... 1 5.88%
csh ... 1 5.88%
mortran ... 1 5.88%
pl1 ... 1 5.88%
ruby ... 1 5.88%
pl_sql ... 1 5.88%
sh ... 1 5.88%
xslt ... 1 5.88%
dylan ... 1 5.88%
modula_2 ... 1 5.88%
eiffel ... 1 5.88%

I transformed Delphi into pascal and added awk and java to my list as
I did lots of stuff with it, but well dunno why omitted it.

Personally I am surprised to be the only having used Ada and I am even
more surprised that Lua missed out at all (I was hoping to see Io and
Self too).
I am sure there is some folks having experience with these

Cheers
Robert

--=20
I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java.
I just didn't know it would be called Ruby
-- Kent Beck

 

[Robert Dober]

Sorry for top posting this is only a reminder where to start updating
the data, please ignore.

 

[Andreas Schwarz]

Personally I am surprised to be the only having used Ada

Oops, I forgot to add Ada to my "tried out" list. I didn't do anything
real with it, but now I'm using VHDL, which is syntactically very
similar (though used completely differently).

 

[Michael Ulm]

A first résumé:


vg age: 34.3125
Avg sex: 0.00*female + 1.00*male
cpp ... 12 70.59% --snip--
ruby ... 1 5.88% --snap--

Personally I am surprised to be the only having used Ada and I am even
more surprised that Lua missed out at all (I was hoping to see Io and
Self too).

I'm more surprised that Ruby only got one vote. I thought I saw it
mentioned more than once. I guess at my age, I can't trust my memory
anymore.

 

[Lionel Bouton]

Andreas Schwarz wrote the following on 18.07.2007 11:26 :

Oops, I forgot to add Ada to my "tried out" list.

Same here. I didn't code anything in Ada, but I had to learn it to code
some source analysis utilities in C++.
This makes me remember some other langages: I've done some assembler
(mainly x86 but 6809 too) work for fun or study, was briefly introduced
to Logo and used Matlab regularly at one point.

Lionel.

 

[Chad Perrin]

Ok I'll put my cards on the table

Okay, here goes . . .

32yo Male, Colorado

Counting only languages in which I could ever do more than "Hello World",
this is my programming linguistic background (in chronological order):
Atari BASIC
QBASIC
C/C++
Logo
DOS batch files (shouldn't really count, but what the heck)
JavaScript
Visual C++ (distinct from C/C++, really) and Visual Basic (ditto for
BASIC)
Perl
PHP
Java, Object Pascal (Delphi), and Objective C, in no particular order
Python and bash, roughly simultaneously
Ruby
Logo again -- UCBLogo to be specific
OCaml
tcsh
C again

Some of those I couldn't do *much* more than "Hello World". In no
particular order, these are languages in which I could and/or can "get
by" if I had/have to:
C
UCBLogo
DOS batch files
Object Pascal (Delphi)
bash
Ruby
tcsh

These are the languages in which I could/can actually claim some real
competence:
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
. . though I'm getting awfully close with Ruby. Looking at that
(somewhat sad) list of three languages, these are all languages for which
I get paid currently, and have for a while. Of them, Perl is the only
one I really like.

In no particular order, languages I really like from the first list:
UCBLogo
Perl
Objective C
Ruby
OCaml

Those languages that are like a poker in the eye for me:
any BASIC
C++
DOS batch files
Visual $foo
PHP
Java
Python (yes, really)

My work, at present, consists mostly of industry and technology analysis
and consulting, web development, small business disaster recovery, and
writing. I guess things are at this point leaning toward increasing the
writing slice of the pie at the expense of the rest of it, and coding
more and more often on projects I like rather than those that I "need" to
pay the bills (since writing takes up the slack).

The professional writing I do is, of course, technology related -- at the
moment, increasingly oriented toward security-related topics. I wouldn't
be surprised if I ended up finding vulnerabilities for a living, at the
rate I'm going. Ruby strikes me as an excellent tool toward that end.
It's also heaps of fun to use.

Did I cover everything? I might have forgotten a language or two along
the way.