I started with an Atari 400 with a BASIC cartridge. ;-) I didn't progress past BASIC for another 8.5 years until I hit university. There they forced me to learn ForTran. Yuck.

From there, I taught myself C the summer before I took Pascal. Boy were pointers hard - I spent 2 months learning the rest of C to the point of being comfortable with it, and 2 months on pointers alone. But that was with just a couple of books and a C compiler. Then Pascal was easy.

Then I got a job doing ForTran to C conversions. This is where I got that last statement in Re^2: How to implement printf like functions from - after "porting" one ForTran program to C, I told them to just give me the input, the output, and I'd write everything in between. Worked better that way. During this job, I taught myself C++ at home.

Next co-op term, I got a C++ coding job. And I learned Delphi. And Windows API coding. Somewhere in here, I taught myself REXX - ticked off my boss that I still was using OS/2 at home ;-)

Then I eventually(!!!) graduated. In this job, I've used C (including Windows API coding), C++, REXX (on OS/2 - impressed the heck out of my team lead with my REXX skill for a new graduate!), Java (to stay away from Windows) and then unix shell script (primarily Bourne shell, with as little C shell as I can get away with). It was in this time where I was making large changes to shell scripts where I discovered perl's one-liners. I was trying to get stuff done with awk and sed, but found perl just a tiny bit easier to write, learn, and code with.

Since then, all my other language skills have atrophied from lack of use... :-)

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

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