Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Sounds Like Weird

Thirty Years of Development

21 August 2005

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.
I’ve excluded database languages and language dialects, but here’s the list, in approximate chronological order:

  1. Basic (and not that visual kind)
  2. Fortran
  3. PL/I
  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

(After this post, I started developing in Ruby, which remains my primary language.)


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