in reply to Roads to Perl

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... :-)

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Re^2: Roads to Perl
by blazar (Canon) on Sep 03, 2005 at 13:21 UTC
    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.
    It seems that many people here have had their first programming experiences with BASIC, something which I expected, taking into account personal experiences from other people I know. I, for one, did never own a Commodore vic20, nor a C64 or an amiga. I did learn some Pascal at high school, which has its own shortcomings and in which I would never program again, but which at least introduced me directly to structured programming.

    Unfortunately I were to be... unfortunate enough (to have) to have my encounter with BASIC. It was at my first university year, and it was the time of 486s and the first generation of Pentiums, but... our graceful Institution gave us a buch of 8088s to program in their ROM-based gwbasic... quite awful! ;-)

    The rest of the story: Re: Roads to Perl

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