Having had a BBC Micro in my teens, I had been used to programming in BASIC and started to get familiar with 6502 assembly. But work, young ladies and bars took my attention away from everything IT. Until in the 1990s, I started university as a mature student. They had some Windows 3.11 machines that I couldn't get on with! The thing that struck me was that I couldn't program this thing like I could a BBC Micro.

But then my housemate tomgracy bought a new computer - with Windows 95. I was blown away by this contraption!

It wasn't long before I bought a secondhand 386 and begged a 36kbps modem, found an AOL CD and connected to this new-fangled internet thing. It would be 1995 probably. In my second year studying physics we did a C++ module and I found for the first time how I could program one of these Windows machines. There was a magazine I bought that had a CD on the cover and I recall being excited that one edition came with Borland C++.

C++ was difficult to get to do anything interesting. Besides I wanted to know about the internet and how to share things on it. Webpages built using MSWord were OK to a point and DreamWeaver was only marginally better.

I cannot recall exactly how I got into working with webpages but I remember learning HTML3 and Javascript from tutorials on WiReD when I was supposed to be revising for an exam...strange how more gets done around exam time!

That led to discovering Perl. I found a few scripts and studied them to find out how they worked. I looked at CGI and worked out how to decode query strings and it all went from there. I knew I was only scratching the surface and wanted to learn more. So I was super excited to see the Computer Science Department at Manchester University were offering a one day course for staff - Introduction to Perl. I went and asked for a place and they let me attend as they were short of numbers. That course was a let down...I already knew more than the instructor, or at least more than he was prepared to teach us. Many of the people on the course didn't return in the afternoon as they found loops too difficult.

The Camel Book went on my Christmas list and I was happy to be unwrapping it on Christmas morning at my then gf's parents...that was my reading for the festive break sorted. Finally understanding arrays and hashes was such a revelation!

And...I've been using Perl ever since...

I've used Java a little to create some Android apps. Even less Node.js on an AWS Lamda server to process Alexa commands.

But other than those small diversions, I only ever program in Perl or client side JavaScript...