Thirty Years of Development
Posted by deirdre Sun, 21 Aug 2005 12:43:31 GMT
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:
- Basic (and not that visual kind)
- Fortran
- PL/1
- Assembly
- Pascal
- Ratfor (which, while a preprocessor for Fortran, is much more Algol/Pascal-like than Fortran like, thus listed separately)
- Forth
- Lisp
- Ada
- C
- Hypercard
- Smalltalk
- C++
- Prolog
- Applescript
- awk
- sed
- Perl
- bash
- Objective-C
- Javascript
- Python
- PHP
- tcl
- Java
What about ruby? I don't see it on the list.
As of the time I wrote that message, I hadn't had a paying Ruby gig. Since then, that's changed.
What was/is your favorite language? (In terms of how enjoyable it was to use)
My favorite is Ruby. Before that, Python. Before that, I didn't have any particular strong feelings about languages until I went as far back as Forth. Before that, Pascal. So I've really had four over that thirty years.