@Jaba – I don’t think that last line is actual lisp code. Or is it? Not enough parentheses there!

@Adam – Javascript is cool, but it has this unique way of pissing me off. Often it’s just hard to debug even with stuff like Firebug and etc.

I never saw F# but I guess I’ll need to check it out just to see how that beast works. :P

I was weaned on C/C++, muddled around with some Java, COBOL, Visual Basic, PHP, and a couple other languages. Today I do most of my “paid” work in C#, ASP.NET, and JavaScript using the ASP.NET AJAX client-side libraries. My favorite language (as of this year) is JavaScript, it’s an incredibly powerful language (depending on how you approach it). JavaScript is a mainstream functional (lambda), object oriented language, based on prototypical inheritance – I like it cause it’s different then many of the class-based programming languages like the C family of languages. I enjoy the mental shift JavaScript induces. I’ve been playing around with Ruby and F# (a functional language for the .NET stack) in my spare time.

:D lol I’m actually in love with LISP, and my anti-spam word is FOOBAR! :D great!
Nowadays I’m researching on soft computing algorithms (mostly evolutionary algorithms: genetics, swarm intelligence, etc), and working in LISP gives you a boost that no other language so far does: you only have to write down the problem, and nothing else (but for lots of parenthesis ;p ).
Not joking, I have years of experience in Java, C, C++, Php and Python, but nothing’s more elegant than functional programming.
Hello world: (format t “Hello world”)
Print all keys from an hash table: (loop for key being the hash-keys of *my-hash* do (print key))

@ths – hehe, one of my professors used to have one of those RPN calculators. He would always volunteer to lend it to students who forgot to bring their own, and then sinker as they were trying to figure it out.

Gunni – yeah, python is very fun. The whitespace thing is bit annoying at first, but you get used to it. Also, I always forget to pass self in methods but other than that it is a great language.

And definitely check out lisp. Makes the brain hurt, but in a good way. :)

I’ve just discovered Python and I like it a lot so far. I haven’t got much experience with programming languages, the only ones I’ve done serious work in are Java, c++ and matlab, but Python seems more fun than those.

I keep waiting to have the free time to learn Lisp seriously though. Talk about sexy. :D

I learnt computers with a self-built 6502 (elektor junior), then I got a Sinclair ZX81, Apple II+ clone (soldered the mainboard myself), and later on for fun of old games I bought a C64 in the 90s. We had old CBM 4016 in school, later replaced by “professional” CBM 8296 with memory bankswitching (I think 2 banks of 48 KB each). I learnt basic and pascal, and very soon switched to 6502 and Z80 assembler. I still know most of the 6502 hex opcodes by heart, and I wrote a CP/M like OS for the Apple, which had no big success, since there was no software for it ;). I still can calculate hex in my head, but stopped short of square roots.

For participating in Fido I wrote most of the software myself with emx Gnu C on OS/2, which I loved at that time. I never got the hang of C++ and Java, but I do like perl’s OO approach, and often use it.

When I met unix at university I was doomed ;). I applied for a job at the computing centre there and had my own SGI IRIX4 desktop workstation, and we had lots of AIX, and DNS was running on 2 sunos boxes. I learnt TeX, ksh and perl (I think it was v4 then) and awk and sed and m4 and all the other goodies, goldies, oldies ;). Oh yes, and of course I took courses in Fortran, Cobol, Scheme (a lisp dialect) and some other strange things not even Lovecraft would talk about.

I had a HP calculator once with RPN, and I used a bit of Forth for fun, but never found a real use for it.

Since 92 I’m a professional consultant, and since 97 I work with Tivoli, mostly on unix with scripting languages around it. For one Tivoli product I had to reactivate my prolog knowledge from the university, and I still like it for this dedicated purpose, although I never understood what to use it for elsewhere.

I’m a total commandline guy, I despise GUIs, and I hate it when there is no other choice than to use a GUI. I think I’d still browse the web with wget and lynx if it wasn’t for youtube ;)

For real programmers, tare only 2 questions to ask when learning a new language:
what’s the comment sign, and what’s the end-of-statement character?

For some fun, here is a link to
nerdtests.com and my result

@Ben – ooh! I didn’t know about cusp. Nice find! I will definitely check it out.

@Miloš – assembly with Bredlau FTW! lol

Btw, my HS C++ class also used Bordland. My other C experience is working on Zaritski’s cluster with gcc. It was fun, but I loved when he scribbled ARRAY BOUNDS!!! and MEMORY LEAK!!! in red pen all over our code. :P

@Tummblr = btw Scheme ⊂ (is a subset of) Lisp.

Oh, crap… I’m getting old….

When I need to do quick and dirty things, I use bash shellscripting

For a real programming language, I use C.
I learned on K&R C [pre-ANSI-C]

I guess I’m an old-timer.

I’m a total programming noob compared to you and most of the readers here.

I’ve taken some college intermediate-level computer science courses taught in C, C++, and Scheme, but I’ve since lost any proficiency I had in those languages (though I’ll probably always be able to read basic C-style code). The only language I can claim any proficiency in is PHP, and there’s one simple reason for that: PHP has awesome documentation!

So my favorite language is PHP; my favorite feature of PHP is its documentation.

hmmmm…Luke, some of the courses you took in your undergrad career are very similar to mine :) Probably cause we took some of them together.
Other than Java, JavaScript, Assembly (wow did I really say that!?) I have experience with C++ (Borland Compiler) and a bit of Perl/PHP