My Progamming Language Journey
1/22/2025 9:26 pm | Share to: 
This post by Ruben Schade walks through his history with programming and the languages he's used. It inspired me to do the same.
QBasic - I did some very early programming with QBasic, but never really unlocked anything with it. I did it because I liked computers and it's what I was supposed to do as someone who liked computers.
HTML - I learned HTML in the early days and I would wager it is the most used language over my lifetime for programming.
mIRC Scripting - This one takes some explaining. In the old days we used chatrooms on a network of servers called IRC (Internet Relay Chat.) It's still around but it's very small these days. Honestly what people are used to in Discord and streaming chat, is basically built on and modeled after chat on IRC.
mIRC was a shareware bit of software which allowed you to write scripts and create "bots." They could do simple things like moderate you chatroom, do simplistic games, run file sharing services, etc. I really got programming with mIRC. I could write something and immediately use it in chat with friends. While I knew and used HTML and enjoyed it, this is really where I feel I became a programmer.
C++ - In high school I learned C++, but honestly I had had a taste of programming for the Internet with HTML and mIRC, and that is where my interest was. C++ and using it online were, at the time, not easily connected and so my interest waned.
Javascript - I didn't immediately dive into it. The history and journey of Javascript is from small functions for the web to the behemoth it is today (which still boggles my mind.) But I didn't really get into Javascript right away. In my mind it was later in high school.
Smalltalk - My freshman year at Georgia Tech, the CS intro course used Alan Kay's Smalltalk. A variant of Lisp. Python caught on as the intro language in the next year or two. Smalltalk was interesting but ultimately again the usage was through a specific lens and it didn't grasp me.
PHP - I don't remember exactly when I picked up PHP. But it has been my go-to development language of choice for web backend programming. Warts and all.
SQL - Around this same time, I also began learning SQL queries. It was entirely to be supplementary to things I programmed.
Java - I only have vague memories of this as a language used for courses. My recollection was it hitting harder on trying to drive object-oriented programming and programming basics. I didn't love the language.
C - I don't remember the exact courses, but I learned C and used it for several courses. I remember doing team projects to make a Tanks game and also a variant on Lemmings that were fun.
Lisp - Full Lisp came later, in a course with Thad Starner. I had actually seen him on TV before the class because he was on the vanguard of wearable computing. For his course, we used Lisp and I recall again, enjoying it, but it was delving deeper into computer theory and again not what I grabbed onto.
ASP - As I recall, I used this for my college internship with Lonnie Harvel. And is my only contribution to a published research paper with 'Using student-generated notes as an interface to a digital repository'. Basically GT was on the forefront of video recording lectures as a resource for students, and we had nascent technology to recognize words in the audio of a video since there wasn't a transcript. So my research was working on ways to take the notes students might write and figuring out ways to tie them back to the video's audio. My core idea was to look for proper nouns and more complex words which would be easier to identify in the video and likely to be relevant to the student.
After college, I didn't immediately go into programming as a career. It became a side hobby mainly. And that hobby time was centralized around websites with PHP, HTML, Javascript and CSS.
ASP.net - When I got back to programming as a daily job, it was largely about ASP.net programming before transitioning back to PHP with Drupal work. I haven't gone back to ASP/ASP.net programming since then.
Kotlin - I learned this briefly back in 2012 as I recall, exploring Android app development. I used it for two app projects to learn and then dropped it.
Python - Honestly, the recency of this language is because I wanted to try it out. I decided to begin learning it for fun and have come to use it a lot more for desktop based projects.
As far as I can recall, that's the list of programming languages I've used, if I missed any there were small one-offs over the years. These days my programming is basically entirely PHP, Python, HTML, Javascript, & CSS.
