I was lucky enough to have worked initially in Focal and FORTRAN at UW (Seattle) and moved
on to PL/I, Pascal and APL at SFU (Burnaby, B.C.) while being exposed to Algol, BASIC, C,
GPSS, Smalltalk, Simula, SNOBOL4, XPL and many other 'esoteric' languages.
Of course, various Assemblers were in the 'mix' - 6800/6809, 8080, Z80, IBM
360/370, IBM 1800, M68K... it's helped me adapt to whatever environment that I wound
up working in.
From: "Johan Helsingius via cctalk" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
To: "cctalk" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Cc: "Johan Helsingius" <julf(a)Julf.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 2, 2024 8:03:38 AM
Subject: [cctalk] Re: APL (Was: BASIC
On 02/05/2024 01:51, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
What would our world be like if the first home
computers were to have had
APL, instead of BASIC?
I don't know, but if you had asked "What would our world be like if the
first home computers were to have had SmallTalk or even ALGOL instead of
BASIC?" I would have said "much better".
I started out with FORTRAN and 6800 assembler, but my first real
programming job was in BASIC. I am fortunate in that they thought
me Pascal in university, and I then got exposed to a bunch of other
real high level languages - if I hadn't, and had continued with
BASIC, I would probably have ended up as a pretty crap programmer.
Julf