User:Nerfer

From Rosetta Code

Learned to program in about the 8th grade on an Atari 400, soon moved to Apple ][+, then the Apple //e.

My first programs were in BASIC (primarily AppleBASIC). A little assembly, quite a bit of Pascal in college. Touched Fortran and Lisp. C for my first job (and I still use it today, 26 years later! Never thought that would happen). Did some basic unix scripts. Ada for a bit, I actually liked that language although many others wanted waivers to not use it (it was mandated at the time for military contracts). Eventually I got into C++, then quite a bit of embedded C++ (a restricted form of C++, without multiple inheritance and polymorphism, and avoids New and Deletes after initialization). Have done a few C# projects, but no expert. Did a sample Qt (a library extension of C++) app, and researched Python. At home lately I've used REALbasic/Xojo.

My first assignment at my first job was to fix a program that scanned source code and pulled out the comments for their detailed design spec. It was like nothing I'd seen before:

/\/\*\* Func
ma
/\*\*\/$
y.'a
G
p

And on and on it went, for several pages. They couldn't tell me how it was failing or how it worked. After a bit of analysis I realized it was written in ex - the script foundation of vi. Eventually it started making sense. If I hadn't used vi extensively in college I would have been totally lost. After that, my assignments don't seem so hard.