If you are looking for:
- A definition of a programming language,
- A comparative assessment of programming languages,
- Introduction to programming,
- Sample codes to solve that tricky code that simply refuses to run correctly,
- A doctoral thesis on computer languages,
- A flame war on languages,
I was introduced to programming in my last year of high school many years ago in 1989, mainly out of curiosity more than anything else. At that time, tinkering with electronics gadgets (transistors, resistors, capacitors, bread/vero boards, soldering iron and so on) was my formal hobby.
At high school, my first introduction to a programming language was some variant of BASIC - to be honest, I had no clue what I was supposed to do with that so called "simple" language.
I do grasp the concept of languages - that is spoken languages I am referring to. I myself speak a couple of languages, others better, Other languages I write better and of course, others are so foreign both in terms of writing, reading, speaking never mind trying to listen and understand.
Learning a programming language, though in many respects akin to learning a spoken language, has a particularly invisible, yet effective barrier that I call the Concept of Implied Systematic Logic (CoISL). Without going into details of CoISL, have you ever had someone remark to you something to the effect of:
"...This is logical...", "...Based on common sense..." or "...You should have known that if x = x + 5 is equal to x + 5..."
After my high school I studied electrical engineering (light current) as it was called then. Light current implied focus on electronics, digital systems and telecommunications. It was in the same year when I started the engineering course that my real interest in programming developed. We had a module on MS-Basic. It was now less arcane then when I saw it in high school. There was a lecture who introduced the class to True Basic - what a phenomenal variant of Basic it was. I was then able to draw sine waves and other graphics on that poor little CRT monitor.
Well, it did not take long and I started to learn Pascal using the Turbo Pascal compiler. That was even more phenomenal for reasons I do not remember now and probably are less important as well. Post Turbo Pascal I was introduced to Borland Delphi 2 at a store when I was inquiring about Visual Basic. I opted for the Borland IDE and eventually upgraded to Delphi 3 followed by Delphi 4. Now I primarily use Free Pascal due to its strong similarity to traditional Delphi.
Well the rest is history. Over the past years I have learned other languages such as Java, Ruby, PHP and C#. I have also dabbled with C/C++, Perl and Python. C/C++ is still useful when programming up microcontrollers. It would be misleading on my part if I did not mention HTML, CSS, JQuery and JavaScript - and yes, there was a time when I thought and believed that JavaScript was the same as Java. I learned very quickly how ignorant. Trust me, that believe was quickly and quietly discarded.
Of course, I have made it a point to learn SQL, it is immensely beneficial for database administrations. I can now confirm that CoISL is not an issue for me any longer.
