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Comment by andrewjshults | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how BASIC didn't make this list. Played around with it first on an old tandy my dad had and then got actually interested when I started learning ti-basic for the ti-86. First "modern" language was PHP, although I don't know if you can really count PHP3 as modern.

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My bad. I'm from a younger generation so I'm pretty uneducated when it comes to some of the earlier programming languages.

Just for curiosity sake, what is now the younger generation (I'm 23 and hadn't quite realized I've already left the younger generation).

I'm 15.

Ah.. MASM, AFD, Peter Norton's PC Programmer's Bible... anybody remembers how that first hyper-link based helpfile was called with all the INTs and stuff ?

Although I studied programming (I was 13) one of those Soviet IBM System/360 clones in FORTRAN I did not like it. I was pretty much fascinated with Ataris which started to popup in USSR in late 80th, so I learnt 6502 assembly soon after I put my hands on one of 130XE. When IBM PCs came in I learnt x86 asm, then C and C++, but much much later :-)

There's probably quite a few people who started out during the 8-bit micro era who will have some variant of BASIC or BASIC + assembly as a 'first language'. Pascal was widely used in higher education during roughly the same period.

Learning simple logic gates in LOGO making the turtle go around a path... do kids still do that today or is it much fancier?

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