What programming languages you know and why ?

[His Divine Shadow]

I'm probably the only one who still does ASP Classic I also dabbled with PHP and javascript, not sure if SQL counts.

Looking at ASP.net and C# tutorials right now to see what I can pick up, want to have some more solid programming abilities.

[adam_grif]

Picture I was just sent by a friend:

[Bounty]

TI-BASIC in high school.

32-bit Intel assembly, though it's only as part of an intro course. So far this is actually the language I've been enjoying most.

Java, which has replaced COBOL as the intro-to-programming language. I haven't been using it long enough to have a real opinion, but that may be because our professor has the annoying habit of letting you do things all fuckling wrong anf then come in the next week with "and this is how it's really done". Asshole.

I may add another one before year's end depending on how well my classes go.

[bobalot]

Does MATLAB programming count? I used it at university and extensively at work.

[Korto]

Basic

Self taught as a kid on a computer by TRS 80 called the MC 10 which came with a whole 4K memory! And if you wanted long-term storage, you plugged in a standard cassette player.
Then did some on the C64. Peek and Poke? Scary.
After that was Q-basic on an IBM. Numbering the lines is optional?
Then VB 4.
Now VB 6. Just amateur-hour programming of small shit for my D&D game. Dice roller, NPC creator, etc.

[Exonerate]

Javascript: Self-taught, first real programming language I learned from my webdev hobby days. I don't like it much, but there's no real alternative and it's quite useful and surprisingly powerful/versatile. I ended up using it in a summer job recently and was surprised by how much it had changed from nearly a decade ago.
Perl: I didn't quite actually learn Perl, just had to do some modifications of a script written in it. Jesus Christ, it's an unholy language that never should have been born, just trying to make sense of it is taxing. I avoid this at all costs and am glad other saner languages seem to have gained popularity over it.
PHP: Another self-taught language from webdev. It beats ASP.net and works for what it's intended to do. I haven't had occasion to use this for years.
Java: Learned this in HS for AP CompSci. I can see why it replaced C++ for the test, it's easier to pick up and still gets across various concepts well enough. Let's face it, memory is cheap nowadays, learning how to manage it can wait for later. I still wouldn't use it if I had a choice though.
C: This is what they used to introduce programming in university. Simple, fast, and effective, an elegant language for a more civilized age?
MATLAB: Hated it at first for its simplicity but gradually got used to it as a quick and dirty way to do loops, plot stuff, and do stuff with matrices. Seems essential to the MechE industry, so I'm glad my school taught it.
C#: Self-taught myself this for a summer job, ended up liking it. It's just easier for me to do more with less with it. It's like Java but not as... clunky. If I had to write a desktop application, this would be my choice of language.

[Thunderfire]

BASIC - My first programming language. I wrote a few programms on Nixdorf machines.
COBOL,Assembly , RPG, Adelia - code maintenance/development on Siemens BS2000 and IBM AS/400 systems
C,C++ - code maintenance on UNIX and Apple Systems
Newton Script - code maintenance on Apple Newton PDAs
Prograph , Realbasic - used to develop time management software on Apple Systems

[haard]

Prolog, Pascal, Basic - used in school or uni, not since
C - Use sparingly in Python projects
C++ - use at work. it's ok.
PHP - I'm told you don't have to write ugly code in PHP - never been able to do that
Java (SE, EE, ME) - use at work and hate with a burning passion. Java does nothing right. (The JVM is kinda nice though)
Ruby, Groovy, Scala - know the basics, had no reason to look closer
Javascrip - use it when I have to
C# - been a while since I used C#
Perl - Coding perl is kinda nice, maintaining perl is hell. Would never choose it myself.
Python/variants - current go-to language of choice
Clojure - taking my first steps in the wonderful world of Lisp

[phongn]

How is C++ slow?

g++ helloworld.cpp

tick tock tick tock, ugh finally.

GCC's C++ infrastructure is pretty slow, IIRC.

[MKSheppard]

10 PRINT I LOVE BASIC
20 GOTO 10

[Solauren]

New many moons ago -
TSR-80 Basic. We had a TSR-80 when they first came out.

New in High School
Turing - We had some of the books in the school, so I read it over. Nice introductory thing.

Pascal - High School programming class. Made my first virtual AI in it (3D Tic Tac Toe)

Learned in College and don't use / haven't used in a long time
Cobol
C/C++ - However, I might get back into that for Xbox programming purposes.
Visual Basic (pre Dot.net)
Visual C# (see above for C/C++)
Javascript
Java

Learned in College and Still use
Visual Basic for Applications
SQL
HTML - rarely, but still

[General Zod]

I don't know why people are including HTML. It's not a programming language at all.

[Starglider]

C++ -- I'm currently taking a CS class on data structures. Who made an AVL tree with iterators? This guy. Man, that was hard.

You mean threaded AVL trees? Good, now bit-pack them for memory usage approaching information-theoretic optimality and make them fully concurrent with lockless read and write. Then you will have my favourite CPU-side simple data structure (GPUs are a different kettle of fish).

10 PRINT I LOVE BASIC
20 GOTO 10

As designated representative of the Military Industrial Complex (tm) you are only allowed to program in, endorse or advocate Ada. With an exception for FORTRAN, for nuclear weapon simulation only.

Does MATLAB programming count? I used it at university and extensively at work.

Sure, to the same extent that Excel macro programming does.

After 2 years of object oriented programming in Java / AS3 with nice easy ways to do most of the things I needed to do, suddenly I'm tasked with building and traversing graphs in C.

I don't see why that is fundamentally any harder in C than object oriented languages. It is somewhat easier to fuck up with real pointers vs references and auto null checking, but that's a code-level detail, the program structure will be the same.

I think it went a little overboard in "object oriented everything"

Java is actually relatively light on the object oriented kool aid (IMHO OO is /still/ overhyped thirty years after it started getting attention); it does actually have primitive types. It does not succumb to the insane belief that computers don't really manipulate bits, although autoboxing will allow you to delude yourself if you insist. Smalltalk and most modern scripting languages do.

and then broke its own philosophy for string concatenation! It's much more natural to go "NUMBER_TYPE + NUMBER_TYPE" rather than "NUMBER_TYPE.add(NUMBERTYPE)"

This is a question of operator overloading, not OO vs non-OO. I agree that Java could have reasonably permitted a few more standard overloads, but I do not agree with user-defined overloads. They are one of the most dangerous and tempting features to abuse and create obfuscated code. Java was designed to appeal more to organisations than individual programmers; organisations want maintainable code bases, programmers (generally) want to do what the hell they like. Since most programmers suck, I derrive vicious pleasure from watching scripting babies whine about Java restrictions, as the compiler finally enforces some much needed discipline.

Reminds me a lot of Java (no surprise there) but with its own weirdness (and the .NET library is not as good as the Java standard one).

Are you sure? This used to be true, but the .NET standard library has been making massive strides forward. There are now combined language/library features such as LINQ that are massively convenient for certain kinds of programming. Of course the VM still sucks compared to Java's, chances of Microsoft engineers ever making systems software as good as Sun/Oracle engineers are negligible.

Java- I hate this. Way too verbose, use in web applications is way too complicated and overengineered.

That isn't so much a language problem, as the massive onslaught of bullshit bloated design patterns that overpaid 'enterprise architects' (aka awful programmers promoted until they can't break the code directly any more) come up with. The worst is the massive towering garbage pile that is the Apache open source Java enterprise, a sprawling mass of interconnected projects that seemingly exist only to wrap, obfuscate and rewrap each other. Because apparently having a call stack depth of less than 100 is a sign that your software is 'insufficiently structured'. The same people have fucked up C# just as badly, just with slightly shorter method names.

[phongn]

Java is actually relatively light on the object oriented kool aid (IMHO OO is /still/ overhyped thirty years after it started getting attention); it does actually have primitive types. It does not succumb to the insane belief that computers don't really manipulate bits, although autoboxing will allow you to delude yourself if you insist. Smalltalk and most modern scripting languages do.

IIRC they didn't even want to put in primitive types at first.

This is a question of operator overloading, not OO vs non-OO. I agree that Java could have reasonably permitted a few more standard overloads, but I do not agree with user-defined overloads. They are one of the most dangerous and tempting features to abuse and create obfuscated code. Java was designed to appeal more to organisations than individual programmers; organisations want maintainable code bases, programmers (generally) want to do what the hell they like. Since most programmers suck, I derrive vicious pleasure from watching scripting babies whine about Java restrictions, as the compiler finally enforces some much needed discipline.

Discipline is good but for people who can actually use the power, operator overloading is easier to read. Java's non-use of overloading is fine but they should've been consistent. It drives me nuts that it's allowed in one specific (if extremely common) case and none others.

Are you sure? This used to be true, but the .NET standard library has been making massive strides forward. There are now combined language/library features such as LINQ that are massively convenient for certain kinds of programming. Of course the VM still sucks compared to Java's, chances of Microsoft engineers ever making systems software as good as Sun/Oracle engineers are negligible.

Microsoft has a good VM/compiler team for them, though, so I suspect they'll keep improving at it. As last I used it, the collections library was still a mess (compared to, for example, Boost/STL). The language features themselves are advancing a lot faster than Java, though (e.g. LINQ, as you mentioned).

[aerius]

Taught myself BASIC on the good old Apple II. Learned Pascal and C++ in university, then forgot everything a couple years after I graduated since I wasn't using any of it. I can't program myself out a paper bag these days.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Taught myself BASIC on the good old Apple II. Learned Pascal and C++ in university, then forgot everything a couple years after I graduated since I wasn't using any of it. I can't program myself out a paper bag these days.

I have to admit that my situation is similar. I taught myself BASIC and Pascal back in the day (1980s and early 1990s). Some shell scripting in Linux / Solaris, mostly with BASH. A bit of FORTRAN for scientific purposes in the 1990s. Later took programming courses in Java. VBScript in order to automate things in Windows, but nothing very advanced.

I am probably a prime example of not mastering the basics very well, since I never took programming seriously enough. Now I'm too old for that shit; it's a well known fact that you can't learn to program very well when you're 30+. Sure, you can still learn something, but probably not beyond the run-of-the-mill level and there's a million guys in India who can do that stuff cheaper.

[muse]

Just BASIC and Pascal. I noodled around with BASIC in school then did a bit of Pascal in an introductory level course during University. I think I did a simple program on my TI-85 calculator but I'm not really sure if I wrote it or copied it so I'm not counting it, my recollections of that time are a little hazy in places.

[phongn]

That isn't so much a language problem, as the massive onslaught of bullshit bloated design patterns that overpaid 'enterprise architects' (aka awful programmers promoted until they can't break the code directly any more) come up with. The worst is the massive towering garbage pile that is the Apache open source Java enterprise, a sprawling mass of interconnected projects that seemingly exist only to wrap, obfuscate and rewrap each other. Because apparently having a call stack depth of less than 100 is a sign that your software is 'insufficiently structured'. The same people have fucked up C# just as badly, just with slightly shorter method names.

At first I thought the Apache Commons-Java stuff was a godsend. And then the dependency hell started appearing - sometimes there are these bizarre requirements. Worse are the eight million implementations of the same thing and then someone makes an abstraction layer and then it's only half-used!

[Dave]

C++ -- I'm currently taking a CS class on data structures. Who made an AVL tree with iterators? This guy. Man, that was hard.

You mean threaded AVL trees? Good, now bit-pack them for memory usage approaching information-theoretic optimality and make them fully concurrent with lockless read and write. Then you will have my favourite CPU-side simple data structure (GPUs are a different kettle of fish).

Hey man, this is Data Structures I'm in, not C++ for Ninjas. I leave the extremely optimized data structures for actual computer scientists or EEs who want to cram more functionality into smaller microchips. I'm just a wannabe.

[Beowulf]

10 PRINT I LOVE BASIC
20 GOTO 10

As designated representative of the Military Industrial Complex (tm) you are only allowed to program in, endorse or advocate Ada. With an exception for FORTRAN, for nuclear weapon simulation only.

He got a waiver.

As for me:
Basic, Perl, RPL, C, C++, C#, Java, Powershell, FORTRAN, SQL, IDL.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I know:

- Clipper: A language used to access dBASE III databases. I once learned it to implement a supply tracking program for my high school's JROTC program.
- BASIC for the Commodore 64.
- QBASIC: I have a whole library of QBASIC programs, developed for my own amusement. Some of them are fiendishly complex.
- Handel-C: An attempt to use C to produce FPGA hardware code. Learned it for a senior project at university. Mostly dead.
- VHDL: Used in work in the past.
- Tcl/Tk: University projects.
- SQL: See above.
- At least five different flavors of assembly. Six, if you count an assembler I wrote in university. I used one in work.
- C++: Used in work.
- C: Used in past work.
- Matlab: Used in university and past work.
- Visual Basic 6: Can die in a fire.
- Java: Used in past work.
- C#: Used in past work.

[Dooey Jo]

If SQL counts, shouldn't stuff like XSLT count as well?

[phongn]

If SQL counts, shouldn't stuff like XSLT count as well?

XSLT is Turing-complete, so it should probably count. SQL is generally considered a fourth-generation programming language (and procedural variants have a fair bit of power).

[Chardok]

Does LOGO count?

[phongn]

Does LOGO count?

Yes.