I started out writing in MSX basic on a friend's sony hit-bit home-computer (remember when they called 'em that?) when I was 10 years old. Anyway, a few years later I bought a commodore 64, and programmed a lot of basic on that thing too, and I learned a bit of assembly.

A while later I sold my C64 to be able to afford an amiga 500. Wrote a lot of assembly on that thing - great machine: real multi-tasking (but no memory protection) and dedicated cpu's for graphics and sound. It's still sitting in my living room - but I don't use it much anymore. It's probably the last machine I did any serious gaming on - somewhere I decided that programming was just more fun :-)

Then (1993) I went to university where I studied Artificial Intelligence - so I learned a few new programming languages; pascal (hated it), prolog (wonderful, but too specific to be useful as an all-round language) and C (which I though was OK, but not that much better than assembly; I've come to appreciate it more and more over time). This was also the time I first ran into UNIX and the internet, (and vi and emacs (-: ). The WWW was just starting around then. I also bought a windows PC and coded some C++ stuff (mostly soft-synths - i.e. software sound synthesizers).

The last few years at uni, I started working at an web-development company (from the beginning of the commercial WWW to boom to bust) where I learned a lot of new stuff - HTML/CSS/assorted web-development, perl, PHP, a little VB, unix shell scripting, MSDOS batch stuff, Java, company politics and a little more C. Somewhere in 1999 I switched from windows to linux as my main OS for professional development. It took some time to get used to but boy was it worth it.

Now, I am a freelance programmer/consultant. I run almost exclusively linux now (except for testing stuff on Internet Explorer and a few audio programs). Most of my professional work is in java, which can be a terribly frustrating language - though I certainly learned a lot from getting to grips with it. When the language isn't fixed for some reason (i.e. 50% of the project isn't already done) I still prefer perl most of the time, but I am also taking a serious look at ruby - it feels like a "new, clean perl" - unlike python, for example - I can't even read python, I wish I knew why.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re: Roads to Perl by Joost
in thread Roads to Perl by gunzip

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