Yesterday I asked a question on the Twitters:

Q: What was the first compiled programming language that you ever used? #firstcompiled

— Fogus (@fogus) December 8, 2014

Amazingly I’ve received (so far) 59 responses that break down roughly into the following groups.

I don’t have any interest in analyzing the data deeply,1 but I think it’s interesting that Pascal2 wins by a landslide. Bear in mind that I’ve distilled the results into larger language types. That is, QBASIC and Quick BASIC became BASIC, Turbo Pascal and UCSD Pascal became Pascal, and so on.

Turbo Pascal was my first IDE and its flavor of Pascal was my first compiled language. In many ways the Turbo Pascal environment spoiled me, and in my mind I feel that it’s not been equaled by modern systems. But, I don’t know if that’s really true. That is, it’s currently difficult for me to separate the nostalgia from my actual experiences all those years ago. I wonder how many of the respondents have the same problem?

I might have to break out an “ancient” Turbo Pascal IDE to see. ;)

:F

  1. Not that I could, given it’s small sample size and likely heavy bias.↩︎

  2. At a glance it seems that Turbo Pascal by itself would best the various flavors of BASIC.↩︎