macapinlac.com

After the little get-together with Colene, Nelson and Ms. Fubsy last night, I started rebuilding my development/staging server at home. It got me thinking about my start in computers, more specifically what programming language did it for me? The one where I said, “Yea, this could work for me. I can do this.”

If I recall correctly, the first language that I was completely facinated with was BASIC. It was simple and logical, the syntax wasn’t the best in terms of logic, branching and loops but it worked. I was 9 years old and I took a BASIC programming summer course in my grade school. I remember my instructor was very funny and very passionate. First lesson in endless loops?

10 print "Hello, Ritchie!"
20 goto 10

After, I remember logo (which was really more of a graphics app) and building a stick figure house (complete with barbed wire fencing and flower beds) with my mom for homework.

Eventually, I was hacking up custom scripts to manage my short-lived BBS. C/C++ code to perform mind-reading games and eventually Object Oriented Java. Wow, admittedly that’s pretty geeky! It wouldn’t be very far-fetched to assume that my one and true friend was my computer at the time and a 28.8 baud modem. Today, there’s a lot: php, ruby, python and perl, etc.

In short, really there wasn’t really one absolute language that hooked me in. It was a combination of things over a period of time.