I started programming when I was eight years old. The first programming language I learned was Basic, followed very shortly by C and 8086 assembly language. During elementary school, I was also exposed to Pascal and Logo. I ignored Pascal because it seemed to me that anything I could do in it I could already do with C, and although I had some fun with Logo’s turtle graphics, I didn’t take it very seriously. At the time, I didn’t appreciate its connection with Lisp and other “serious” programming languages.
The computer science courses in my high school were taught through Turing, a situation which nobody liked. Some of my classmates already knew how to program, mostly in Basic or Pascal. Knowledge of C was considered somewhat elite. I bought cheap (student or home) editions of both Microsoft and Borland development tools. I made some money doing miscellaneous jobs, mostly using C++, which was my favourite language during those years and for the first several years of university. Some of these jobs involved updating legacy code written in Fortran, which I had to learn to read. I also had some small exposure to Lisp through AutoCAD, but not very much. I did, on the other hand, write a lot of Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code for Microsoft Office.
I learned a lot of web programming in my first year of undergraduate studies, because it was a hot topic at the time, and also because the university provided free web space. This meant HTML, Java, JavaScript, VBScript, and Perl (because of the many CGI programs written in that language). A little bit later I also learned PHP, which was relatively new at the time. In school, I also learned hardware description languages such as SPICE and VHDL. Because the university’s systems were run on Unix (and, later, GNU/Linux), I also learned shell scripting. (Of course, I already knew how to write batch files for DOS/Windows, but that hardly counts as a programming language.)
In the third year of university, I was finally properly introduced to Scheme and Lisp. Unfortunately, I was in an environment that wasn’t very supportive of the study of those languages. My fellow engineering classmates were used to C/C++ or Java (or more generally, imperative programming), and many mocked the (to them) bizarre syntax of Scheme and the λ-calculus. However, I appreciated that there were things I could easily do in Scheme or Lisp that would be difficult — or even impossible — to do in C/C++ and Java. I thought that it was unfortunate that no one had explained the rationale behind Lisp to me earlier, even though I had already been exposed to Lisp on multiple occasions before then. I think that Lisp is a better introductory language for teaching computer programming than C, because it seems to me that Lisp programmers can easily learn C, whereas people who have gotten used to C have a difficult time learning Lisp.
Because I was in an engineering program, during my upper undergraduate years I wrote a lot of programs in Matlab, in addition to programming in C/C++. This continued throughout my first postgraduate degree, which was in electrical engineering, at the University of Toronto.
When I came to the University of Waterloo for a second postgraduate degree, this time in computer science, I joined the Programming Languages Lab. I was also a teaching assistant for several programming courses, including CS442/642, the university’s upper year/graduate-level Principles of Programming Languages course. Needless to say, I learned many, many programming languages during this period, in a large variety of programming paradigms.
For my quantum computing research for the past several years, I have been using mostly Maple and Mathematica, in addition to Matlab. Because of this, I may have gotten rusty with my programming skills in the more general-purpose (i.e., non-mathematical) languages. Because I’m interviewing for software engineering jobs, I need to brush up on these skills.
I’ve collected some programming exercises from various places, and in this series of posts, I’m going to do these exercises in a variety of languages, for practice. I’ll also comment on the suitability of the various languages to different tasks and compare them with one another.
– davinci 11792
You said you’ve leanred many language before , in fact you just waste all your life infront of a computer screen , learn couple of languages and master them is too mutch better than learning all the world programming language without really having a gole, life is too mutch better than waste it on learning usless stufs..:)