12 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

The same can be said about programming languages

Rob,

When I started programing I was doing Assembly and Fortran using punch cards and when I retired a couple of years ago we were using Julia to build our models.  Yea, I know I'm old. 🤣

I will never forget the thousands of cards I punched. I had decks that were in excess of 5000 cards and you never wanted to drop one. Glad those days are over. 

3 minutes ago, 188AHC said:

I will never forget the thousands of cards I punched. I had decks that were in excess of 5000 cards and you never wanted to drop one. Glad those days are over. 

yes, 1974, IBM 360, Fortran.....

31 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I'm lucky, I missed the punch cards by 1 year ... PDP-11/44.

4MB memory limit, 16bit addressing ... powerful!!

Cheers, Rob.

yes, 1976, PDP 8, paper tape and booting the machine by loading the boot program with switches

Edited August 3, 20196 yr by yurei

I did the card thing too... horrible. 

My very first "programming" adventure on the IBM360 was to use the console to toggle in "Hello World" and have it print out on the line printer. I had the same professor for Fortran IV, COBOL and RPG one semester. He used essentially the same exercise in each language for all three classes. I turned in one of assignments where I had used RPG for the I/O, COBOL sub-routines for the database, and Fortran IV sub-routines to handle the math... All three classes covered in one program...

...he was not really amused, but conceded that I had in fact completed the assignment in a unique way and allowed it to stand as satisfactory. He just stated "Don't do that again" in my classes!

I had a real mind-bender when I took two semesters worth of Lisp...

I programmed in Cobol, Basic, RPG, Fortran, and machine.  Actually, it was fun at the time but I'm glad it's over now.

Many years ago I wrote a complete accounting package in Basic on a Commodore Pet with 4k of memory and a tape drive. Boy, I thought I was something.😁

Now it seems as if programs are starving if they don't have 16gb of memory. It's been wonderful to have lived through this life of computer development . Young people today have no idea.😊

 

OK. I got caught up in talking about our computer histories and got somewhat off topic. I apologize.  I blame Bluestar. He started it.😁

However, our conversation does tie in with the subject at hand, "What developers want" but that's a stretch.  I promise not to do it again.

I will give myself 12 hours of suspension for being bad. Please forgive me.

 

 

17 minutes ago, n4gix said:

.. two semesters worth of Lisp...

Lisp was very interesting...Lua is actually very similar.

Timex Sinclair...

umm....timeline by programming language...

1973-1974 Basic and Fortran on IBM 1130 (some dabble in RPG) my first program was a Turing machine emulator

1974-1976 Fortran IV  and LISP on IBM 360

1975-1977 PAL 3 Assembly language on PDP-8

1980-1985 Basic on HP 85/86 (wrote a lot of math software for mapping industry on these)

1985-1989 Basic on DOS based IBM PC 

1989-1996 the "modern" era of Windows

1992-1993 my first network based on Windows NT 3.0

and now back to the current time xD we have started with Scala in the first years during computer science studies (2013-2017) and then moved on to Java together with some a basic course in Assembler to learn how it is all working on the lower end xD. In my spare time I have teached myself C#

I thought it couldn't get any better when we went to an IBM 370 running on DOS.

One of the things I liked about COBOL was the ability to do my sorts in the JCL.  

I also thought BASIC was a very good language with a lot of power.  On one trip from NYC to SFO I wrote a program in it to see how many digits of 4ATAN(1) it could calculate. I got to 2^15.  I figured to get the program to go any farther I would have to lie to it.  🙂

 

I started with a comodore 64, you used magnetic tapes to read and save your code..

Then Cobol, Fortram, Pascal and C++. Learned later Visual Basic, Clarion, Java, JavaScript, and many others.

Lately. NET C# and VB, I think it is fair to say we developers learn anything after the first 2 languages are mastered, it always amaze me our ability to adapt, specially when you look back in time as per this thread.

I wonder what would be 25 years from now, specially with the speed of changes with current technologies.

My hats off to all of you.. 

Regards,

Simbol 

I'm probably one of the few people here under the age of 30 who knows the difference between a floppy and a stiffy and has seen and worked with both.

Edited August 5, 20196 yr by JB3DG