Computer programming

Computer programming is the act of creating a list of instructions for a computer to follow.

Personal

I saw my very first computer program on a TRS-80 Color Computer, written in Color BASIC, when I was around six-years-old, and helped write my first program on an Atari XE, in Atari BASIC, when I was around eight. I began writing my own programs in GW-BASIC shortly thereafter with the help of my uncle using his Tandy 1000, and, when my family got a computer in 1991, I started using QuickBASIC. I occasionally tried to do some extremely simple stuff in C, but, as Windows became more popular, I gravitated toward Visual Basic instead. Most of my teen years were spent on QuickBASIC and Visual Basic, though I occasionally worked with C in high school. I got a job when I was 19-years-old writing primarily in Visual FoxPro which makes heavy use of SQL. In order to work on this web site, I started learning about various Internet programming languages including JavaScript and PHP. For Windows scripting, I like JScript, and I'm trying to teach myself more C#. I also know a little Python, Java, C, C++, and 6502 machine language.

I very much prefer case-insenstive languages.

Languages I Know

This table lists the computer programming languages I know, even if only a little. They're ranked (out of 10) by how fluent I am in them and how much I appreciate them.

Language	Fluency	Appreciation	Preferred IDE	Notes
6502 machine language			FCEUX debugger	Extremely hard to use, but it runs at lightning speed. Extremely popular in 8-bit CPUs.
C			Visual Studio	Credit for being so foundational, but very cryptic to work with.
C++			Visual Studio	Painful to read due to the overuse of symbols, but insanely powerful. Really should convert to use words to make it more friendly.
C#			Visual Studio	My favorite desktop application development language. Extremely quick and easy.
COBOL				Used it briefly in college. Horrible, horrible, horrible.
FreeBASIC			WinFBE Suite	A fantastic modern 64-bit BASIC variant.
Java			NetBeans	Terrible UI designer, but codes easy enough.
JavaScript			Notepad++	A surprisingly competent scripting language that can do pretty much anything in a browser.
JScript			Notepad++	Only useful on the Windows OS.
Lua			ZeroBrane Studio	I learned this for hacking video games, and developed an appreciation for its unique quirks, though its severely under-powered.
PHP			PHPStorm	An absolute mess of a language. It's like a quickly hobbled together Frankenstein's monster that's just barely alive enough to move. Every time I learn something new about it, I hate it even more. It has some of the worst online documentation imaginable. The fact that server-side programmers continue to suffer its existence makes me weep for the future of computer programmers.
Python				I don't understand why people like this language. Indented scope is a bad idea, and making everything a tuple is annoying. I don't find it easy to work with or useful for development of any type of application.
QuickBASIC			QuickBASIC	The best traditional BASIC variant of the late 1980s and the whole of 1990s. Introduced structured programming.
SQL			HeidiSQL	Wonderful for data handling, and nothing else.
Visual Basic			Visual Basic	Used to be the best for RAD. Never should have been discontinued.
Visual FoxPro			Visual FoxPro	Been writing professionally since 1999. A wonderful hybrid of Visual Basic and SQL. Shame Microsoft killed it.

Markup Languages I Know

These aren't so much programming languages as structural layouts. Most are for design, but some are for data.

Language	Fluency	Appreciation	Notes
HTML			Been typing it by hand since 1998.
CSS			For as many committees, meetings, and versions it's gone through, it's still really unfriendly and messy! For example, centering text, a box with an absolute width, and a box with a relative width all have to be done differently, and two of them are very non-intuitive. Centering vertically is even worse!
MediaWiki			Superior to HTML and CSS in several respects, but also much weaker and ultimately based on them.
CSV			An extremely simple data format, but, without an official way to escape problem characters or identify file encoding, rather error-prone.
XML			An extremely slow and bloated data format that was meant to do everything, and, therefore does nothing well. Querying it is like pulling teeth and extremely abstract. Good luck if you need to read it from an older language or if your source relies heavily on namespaces!
VT			An old video terminal markup language for displaying on old text terminals.
SVG			A vector graphic markup language using XML.

Media

Images

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  A time line showing the evolutionary history of programming languages.

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  A quick look at programming languages.

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  A flowchart of which programming language you should begin with. Skewed toward Python.

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  Saving the princess with various programming languages.

Videos

Women programmers.

Articles

• Operator overloading

Categories

• Programming Languages
• Scripts

Links

 

• rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code - Rosetta Code, various programming snippets in various languages.
• repl.it - Replit. An online interpreter of many languages.