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The first five languages I learned back in the 70s: FORTRAN, Pascal, PL/I, SNOBOL, APL. Then I was an Ada and Icon programmer in the 80s. In the 90s, it was C/C++ and I just never had the enthusiasm for it.

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Icon (which came from SNOBOL) is one of the few programming languages I consider to embody truly new ideas. (Lisp, Forth, and Prolog are others that come to mind.)

Icon is an amazing language and I wish it was better known.

You probably know this but, for anyone else who is interested, the easiest way to get a feel for Icon nowadays may be through its descendant Unicon which is available at unicon.org.

thanks for the reminder. will give it another try.

I found Pascal more readable as a budding programmer. Later on, C's ability to just get out of the way to program what I wanted trumped the Pascal's verbosity and opinionatedness.

I admit that the terseness of the syntax of C can be off-putting. Still, it's just syntax, I am sorry you were disuaded by it.

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