I was asked a few weeks ago how many languages I’ve been paid to develop in during my thirty years as a software engineer and developer. At the time, I came up with twenty-five on the spot, so I’m obviously missing a few here and there.

I’ve excluded database languages (e.g. dBase II) and language dialects, but here’s the list, in approximate chronological order:

1. Basic (and not that visual kind)
2. Fortran
3. PL/1
4. Assembly
5. Pascal
6. Ratfor (which, while a preprocessor for Fortran, is much more Algol/Pascal-like than Fortran like, thus listed separately)
7. Forth
8. Lisp
9. Ada
10. C
11. Hypercard
12. Smalltalk
13. C++
14. Prolog
15. Applescript
16. awk
17. sed
18. Perl
19. bash
20. Objective-C
21. Javascript
22. Python
23. PHP
24. tcl
25. Java