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Started with BBC Basic and 6502 assembler at home, then Pascal at school on CP/M and DOS, then FORTRAN and MATLAB at college on VMS, then C++ and Perl on Solaris at work, then PL/SQL, then OCaml for personal projects, now mainly Python on Linux for work. I also have Acorns and Commodores at home for tinkering.

For work tho', only work counts. Real-world programming is not just about programming, it's doing so within a set of constraints that you don't have a say in (e.g. compatibility with existing systems, OS, deadlines/timescale, specs, users, etc etc). Adapting to these situations is what makes a successful industrial programmer, not what you did as a kid.



My very first program, in BBC Basic, was for work, drawing a graph of some kind of lab instrument data interfaced via the analogue port. That was 1989 or 1990, and I didn't do any programming again for at least a year or two until learning Fortran at university.




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