Dan McKinley
Math, Programming, and Minority Reports

@mcfunley.com

Memetastic
September 8th, 2008

At the behest of Ira Pfeifer here is every programming language I have ever learned. I have grouped these into families since I have met people that have touted the nine variants of COBOL that they know as separate languages and I have considered all of these people to be deserving of horrible, horrible deaths. The grouping makes chronological order impossible.

  1. BASICs: TRS-80 variety, GWBASIC, QBASIC, VB6, VB.NET.
  2. C
  3. Assemblies: x86. And okay, MIPS in school. I have actually written MSIL by hand for production use, although I am not sure if that really belongs here.
  4. C++, to the degree that anyone other than Stroustrup, Stepanov, and Sutter actually knows this byzantine mess.
  5. Pascal, but I quickly reconsidered.
  6. Shell scripts: cmd.exe batch, Bourne, Monad
  7. Java
  8. ML’s: SML, OCaml, F#
  9. PHP
  10. Coldfusion. Feel free not to count this. I just completely forgot that this ever existed and felt like listing it.
  11. Turing complete SQL’s: T-SQL, plpgsql
  12. C#
  13. Lisps: Common, Scheme, and Emacs
  14. Python
  15. Haskell
  16. Javascript
  17. Erlang
  18. Ruby
  19. Horrible ideas that some enterprisey person should be in prison for: NAnt, Ant.

Things that Wikipedia lists as languages but that might be going too far with this: YACC, XSLT, Matlab. It’s hard to pick favorites between Haskell and the Lisp variants. I can get a lot of work done in Lisps but appreciate Haskell for its brainsmashing purity. If I had to point out an obvious deficiency it’d be that I have yet to play with Factor.

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