English - The language I know best, at least in terms of reading/writing. A wonderfully expressive language.
Hebrew - My "mother tongue". Much smaller than English, but it's the language I use every day (in the real world, I mean.)
Spanish - A language I'm learning (pretty good at already). Very lyrical, very fun to speak. Exists in many countries, which certainly helps when travelling the world. Also, having a written language system which is phonetic, i.e. corresponds exactly to how you're speaking, is so much better.
Russian - A language I'm starting to learn. Very difficult. Honestly, it doesn't sound as good as some other languages, but it is very fun to actually speak. Lots of unique sounds that you don't find in other languages, and they're really fun to make.
French - I barely know the language but I've learned a bit, and I'm planning to learn more. Very difficult, but it is a beautiful sounding language.
Programming language of aunt's calculator: turned a calculator (boring) into something you can program (cool!). Editing was tedious, so it made me figure it out on paper first (good thing!).
ZX Spectrum Basic - at your fingertips mere fractions of a second after powerup. Can your Eclipse do that?
Z80 assembly language - so fast and so powerful. Magic knowledge for gaining infinite lives in games.
Pascal - structured programming and type safety for the win.
C - nothing in your way, the only limit is yourself ;)
C++ - it has classes!
OCaml - the pinnacle of type safety without typing the types (excuse the pun). And its fast.
Smalltalk - all you need to know about the object-oriented paradigm is there.
Java - Has libraries for everything.
Delphi - I think it's still the fastest way for putting together a decent looking windows GUI app.
Clojure - its constructs for concurrent programming are life changing. And it's a Lisp. With extra readability for the parentheses-challenged. With a very well thought out standard lib.
In Order:
Logo: HOLY SHIT I'M 8 AND I CAN MAKE THE COMPUTER DO SHIT!
QBasic: Easy to get started and allowed me to write text games for myself
AGT: DOUBLE HOLY SHIT I CAN WRITE MY OWN TEXT ADVENTURES?!
ZZTOOP: You gave the gamers a language to write their own levels. Freaking Schweet.
VB 4: Having controls is kinda nice!
Delphi: I don't remember much. I think I liked... That I was better then anyone else in my highschool class.
Java: Lots of libraries and lots of people in the ecosystem. Plus, I got good at typing.
Motorola Assembler: Hackity Hack! Whoo, LEDS! Made me appreciate higher level constructs, and also gave me a greater understanding of CPUs and how I am really standing on the shoulders of giants.
C: Very powerful access to the OS.
Haskell: Functional Programming hurt my brain but gave me an appreciation for the elegant.
Prolog: I just love the "Define Solution: Get Implementation" nature of Prolog.
Groovy: Having live scripting makes it much easier to do work with JMeter, which is otherwise annoying difficult.
Ruby: Makes things easy, unverbose.
C#: Lots of libraries, more cool language features in every version, the best IDE I've ever used. Not as verbose as Java but just as accepted.
Scala: Woah. SO much fun. I'm really liking how enjoyable and simple it makes solving problems. My new favourite toy.
PHP - Everyone seems to hate you, but you've managed to help me get every job done. You may be a pain in the ass at times, but I love you and I'm sticking by your side.
Python: Incredible, no matter how untidy it is it still works
JavaScript: Ditto but faster
Visual Basic: admit it, that was an awesome IDE, especially for 1993
Excel Macro Language: before VB, Excel had macros in cells and you could do weird things with them. I wrote a really nice tax avoidance system in it for a bank once.
C: I don't know why I waited so long to take it up./n Unfriendly string handling offset by beauty of economy./n/n
x86 assembler: My, you're versatile.
56k assembler: Computers are so much more fun when you don't need an operating system
This thread: quite educational actually. I should go back and look at Lua.
Lisa Assembler: I was really young and only capable of typing in examples from the manual and books I had taken out of the library. I liked the pre-made graphics routines best.
GWBASIC/QBASIC: I had lots of fun making games with these languages. It was very easy to conceptualize a program as a sequence of steps at that age.
C/C++: I'd bought one of those "Learn to Program Games in 24 Hours" books. It took a little longer than that with school and everything, but my friends thought it was pretty cool.
Perl: Wow. You changed everything. I started to think about programming as a language rather than a set of formal instructions. I had a lot of fun making games, bots, and my first "web log" script.
PHP: I had given up programming for a while when I decided I wanted to get into music. But when that failed I was able to pick you up and walk into a job that really turned things around for me and kicked off my career. You were really easy to learn.
Python: You introduced me to concepts I hadn't heard of before in a way that was approachable.
Lisp: You spoiled me. I love conditions and restarts, CLOS, and real symbolic debugging. I come home to you after a long day of work and smile. You make programming fun.
Logo - first taught me that computers were programmable. that little turtle actually went where I told it to!
BASIC - Forget the turtle, this machine can actually do real stuff - interaction, graphics, solving my rubik's cube. For a young kid, the declarative style of programming was simple enough to make sense
FORTRAN77 - First taught me to think about how data was stored and the difference between the value and the address (and pointer arithmetic).
C - What can you say about C? It's the fundamental building block.
MIPS Assembly - At the end of the day, you've got to move bits and bytes around in registers. Programming assembly taught me how that all works.
LISP - opened my eyes to recursion and functional programming. moreso, it first showed me that programs could be elegant.
Python - It's fast and easy to read. I can show a program to non-programmers, and they can often get the gist of what it's doing. Python code is the most "readable" code I've written.
- Logo/hypercard. My highschool doens't even own a pc at this point as I command the turtle around
- True Basic. Fast forward to the line-number free future. Also the birth of my first project, an implementation of ELISA.
- Pascal. Let there be types! Also runs on a computer I can actually buy myself so I am no longer dependent on daddies apple. Also the first language my dad doesn't know. Both important factors if you are 14.
- VHDL. Wow so this is how my VCR works.
- Miranda. Met a hacker who managed to make pacman with it.
- Assembler/C. Wow so this is how my computer actually works
- Java. super('let there be objects')
- PHP, breading ground of the "read php.net - code a zillion lines - eat pretzel" SE methodology. Also pays bills.
- Matlab. Working with images never was easier. Nurses unique coding skills through skillful (miss) use of find or cumprod.
- Python. New found partner, we are in the exiting and slightly scary 'getting to know each other" period
Basic: easy enough for me to write silly scripts on the old Apple at the back of the classroom
Pascal: you kept me from falling in love with programming before I declared Physics
Mathematica: your ability to solve symbolic equations is astounding
IDL: you made it easy for me to produce ugly graphics and served as my union card with astronomers
Perl: you helped me get to python so much faster
C: getting good at you encouraged me to learn more about development best practices. basic debugging and version control make me a coding mastermind relative to my peers.
S-Lang: you convinced me of the horrible dangers of Not Invented Here
C++: you've kindly stayed out of code I've needed to do serious work with
Python: you've got so many packages, half of my work is already done. Plus you painlessly taught me some OOP!
PHP. My first language was a web language, not basic or anything like normal people. It just came naturally to me while learning html/css in 6th-7th grade, when I realized I could make online games. It's really fun for people who don't know programming.
Javascript. I can send stuff without refreshing my page using AJAX? Sweet deal.
Java. They teach it in schools, so what the heck. I learned recursion and objects with it!
Ruby. Is. Love. MVC, scaffolding, etc etc was introduced to me through rails. omg why does PHP look ugly all of a sudden?
Perl. I backtracked to learn about CGI. Helped that its syntax had similarities to PHP. Useful tool language for processing stuff especially text.
C++. Whoa I can get programs to run that fast?! Whoa I understand pointers, omp & tbb, and cool low-level stuff!
MIPS. Well, it was useful for learning pipelining.
Python. Useful/sweet language that everyone seems to be all over at least on campuses, but I discovered Ruby first so python was kind of "what's the big deal I can do this in ruby" for me.
Clojure. My first lisp! So weird. Cool? You're supposed to be good at parallel stuff, I can't wait to learn more about you.
php: ah now I really know that html isn't programming
VB: look when I click submit the stuff from the form prints
C: Pointer are awesome spezially when you know how they work and the other people in the class dont :)
C#: Array list rock if your used to C arrays
Dylan: OO done write
Clojure: Wow. FP is much better then OO. Wow. Lisp is as cool as I thought it is. Wow. Concurency made easy :)
English: helps me get around, lots of cool curse words.
Japanese: was able to ask for the restroom in Tokyo, and got some cute girls giggling at me
BASIC: got me started in programming
Visual Basic: Let me make some fun desktop apps, like my Special Ed sound board with prank call capabilities. Also taught me I really needed to get back to using Macs.
Real Basic: Let me make some apps on the Mac like I did with Visual Basic. Then made me realize I didn't like using environments like VB and RB anywhere.
html: Got me started in web development.
javascript: Taught me that frameworks are freaking awesome and to love prototypal OO languages.
php: Sorry, I used it for years and it just taught me to orient towards frontend work. Hell, I can't even get a cute girl to giggle with php, so what's the use?
python: Dear Python, I just wanted to let you know how much I love you. You are such a great language. So simple and straightforward, so easy to understand and to get along with. Its like we were made for each other. I get along with you so much better than my old partner, php.
Python taught me about list comprehensions and bound methods.
I've never played with Python before, and I'm trying and failing to understand what bound methods are. Could anyone explain them?
(started out chronological, then became stream of consciousness)
QBasic. Got me started, simple and easy to learn.
Java. While verbose, your libraries are second to none. You taught me event driven programming and were the vessel for many of my future endeavors
C. Fast, clean, powerful. I enjoy working with you when I can.
C#. A clone of Java! Your libraries are a bit different from Java, but when I got to know you, I found out you're not so bad after all :)
MIPS. There's something empowering about thinking at as low a level as you
Lisp(CLisp,emacslisp). Elegant, clean, brief. You have great power. Some day I need to dust off my parenthesis and try self-modifying code in you.
netlogo. Erm ... well, it was really easy to create complex systems using you!
Prolog. You are the most unique language I've ever worked with, period.
verilog. It was neat working ~that~ low a level!
python. Working with you is like sex. Everything I want to do with you happens so intuitively, I love it.
Google's Go. Your type system is beautiful. I hope to work
with you more in the future.
VB6: wow you could get a lot of pretty productive stuff done quickly
Matlab: This is how math on a computer should be written.
R: Convinced me there is nothing better than a long lived environment with repl which preserves state. In fact, this is how all code should be written. Also demonstrates open source and provide the best software at least in technical niches.
Java: convinced me garbage collection is good and made me a much better typist.
Ruby: wow you can get a lot of work done quickly -- at least in dev time.
Hebrew - My "mother tongue". Much smaller than English, but it's the language I use every day (in the real world, I mean.)
Spanish - A language I'm learning (pretty good at already). Very lyrical, very fun to speak. Exists in many countries, which certainly helps when travelling the world. Also, having a written language system which is phonetic, i.e. corresponds exactly to how you're speaking, is so much better.
Russian - A language I'm starting to learn. Very difficult. Honestly, it doesn't sound as good as some other languages, but it is very fun to actually speak. Lots of unique sounds that you don't find in other languages, and they're really fun to make.
French - I barely know the language but I've learned a bit, and I'm planning to learn more. Very difficult, but it is a beautiful sounding language.