I started on AmigaBASIC and later ARexx. QBasic on later 386/486 machines. Pascal, OOTuring (a Pascal-like educational language), and C in high school. Perl near the end of high school. Python in my early twenties. Common Lisp in my late twenties. Have tried a bit of Haskell and OCaml here and there. Though I'd say I've settled on Python, C, and Common Lisp... trying to make brain space for OCaml only because I find Mirage to be such a great idea.
I've given talks on BloomL implementations, constraint propagation solvers in game level design, and have written various bits of libraries and such over the years. Nothing terribly "ninja" like here. Depending on the audience I may sound like a wizard or a clueless hack. The reality is I'm probably somewhere in the middle in skill if programming were a quantifiable skill. The only reason I can cite these things is because I tried and learned some things not because I was born with some legendary ability to whisper to a computer what I want it to do. At the end of the day they are just machines and there's nothing super-human or special about learning how they work. It just takes time and effort like anything worth doing.
The theory, as I understand it, is that without sufficient evidence we must assume that programming ability follows the same bell-curve distribution as every other quantifiable skill we can measure.
I started on AmigaBASIC and later ARexx. QBasic on later 386/486 machines. Pascal, OOTuring (a Pascal-like educational language), and C in high school. Perl near the end of high school. Python in my early twenties. Common Lisp in my late twenties. Have tried a bit of Haskell and OCaml here and there. Though I'd say I've settled on Python, C, and Common Lisp... trying to make brain space for OCaml only because I find Mirage to be such a great idea.
I've given talks on BloomL implementations, constraint propagation solvers in game level design, and have written various bits of libraries and such over the years. Nothing terribly "ninja" like here. Depending on the audience I may sound like a wizard or a clueless hack. The reality is I'm probably somewhere in the middle in skill if programming were a quantifiable skill. The only reason I can cite these things is because I tried and learned some things not because I was born with some legendary ability to whisper to a computer what I want it to do. At the end of the day they are just machines and there's nothing super-human or special about learning how they work. It just takes time and effort like anything worth doing.
The theory, as I understand it, is that without sufficient evidence we must assume that programming ability follows the same bell-curve distribution as every other quantifiable skill we can measure.