February, 16, 2024 archives

I think I have always had an interest in playing around with different programming languages. My first probably would have been Applesoft BASIC. In elementary school, I remember writing a bouncing-lines graphic toy more than once, and D&D character generators.

I am really not sure what came next, but it was probably mostly things like DOS batch files (and eventually 4DOS batch files).

I wrote some little utilities for DESQview in x86 assembly and even released them as freeware, but I haven’t been able to track them down again.

The first substantial project I did was probably the billing and reporting system for my dad’s company that was written in FoxPro before it was even acquired by Microsoft. This would have been where I first encountered SQL, too.

All of this would have been essentially self-taught. I vaguely remember participating in some computer classes or clubs, but nothing terribly structured. I’m sure that I was exposed to Pascal, probably Turbo Pascal, at some point in those.

One memory from my freshman year at college is that I used the (* multi-line syntax *) of Pascal comments on an assignment instead of the { single-line syntax } and the grader for the assignment had some sort of reaction about that.

I was exposed to a lot of programming languages in college, especially because I had to take the “Programming Languages” class twice after failing it the first time. (I had a rough time in my sophomore year.) It was taught by different professors who used different languages to teach the concepts. Some languages I remember doing at least an assignment or two in: C, Fortran, ML, Scheme, Lisp, Perl, COBOL, Ada, and APL. Part of Harvey Mudd College’s program is a capstone project in your senior year where you work on a project for an outside company or organization. The project I was part of was a wrote a tool for doing internationalization for voicemail prompts for Octel Communications using Visual Basic.

My first job after college was for an educational/games software company named Knowledge Adventure (KA) on a project that was released as “Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair.” At the time, all of the projects at the company were done using an in-house programming language named “Acomplish” (or maybe “Accomplish”) which was short for “A Computer English.” I have been trying to dig up some reference to or examples of it and have come up empty so far, but it was a natural-language-ish syntax that had originally been intended for producers to write in. By the time I worked there it was mostly being used by programmers who graduated from Mudd, CalTech, and UCLA, which is kind of funny.

It was while working at KA working on their website that I got involved in the early days of PHP. I guess here is where someone could make jokes about how obviously someone who had failed “Programming Languages” had a hand in PHP, but I don’t recall that I had very much, if any, involvement in the actual design of the language. (Although I remember having to write way too many emails to make that case that casting a string to an integer should not interpret it the same way as numeric literals because people would have brought out pitchforks when leading zeroes caused them to be interpreted as octal values.)

At KA, the second title I worked on (what was released as “Dr. Brain’s Thinking Games: IQ Adventure”) was coded in C/C++ after we had done some initial prototyping in Acomplish. The game had a multiplayer component and we ended up borrowing the graphics and networking library from our (at the time) sister company, Blizzard Entertainment. (I later went on to have the worst programming interview experience of my life, so far, there.)

When I left KA they were in the process of adopting a new engine for all of their projects that was Java-based, or maybe just evaluating it. In any case, I never ended up working with that engine but I did a small contract project around this time that was a Java applet. (It was for the website for a show on NBC.)

My next job was at HomePage.com, which was an idealab startup that was basically a second-generation GeoCities. (A number of the folks in the management team were actually ex-GeoCities people who cashed out when that was acquired by Yahoo.) We built our system in Perl (with mod_perl), and built a sort of primitive HTML templating system called Gear. The original parser was regex-based until one of the other senior engineers wrote a proper lexer and parser for it.

I’m not sure when I first started working in JavaScript, but it was probably somewhere in this period.

After HomePage.com, I ended up working for MySQL Ab leading the web team, which meant back to writing a bunch of PHP code. And I am sure I had encountered Python before this, but recently I dug up something I wrote during this time in Python that connected to our bugs database, announced new bugs, and could be queried in a few ways. During the rest of my time at MySQL, I did more C/C++ programming, probably more Perl, and even did a tiny bit of work with Ruby.

Other programming languages I have played with at some time or another: Logo, MATLAB, OCaml, Tcl, Dylan, Oberon, Modula, and Delphi (Object Pascal).

Most recently I have been playing around with Rust and Go, and done some reading on Swift.

This whole train of thought was actually triggered by seeing Delphi mentioned in a job description and it reminded me of how intrigued I was when I first encountered it. I have a soft spot for Pascal and the successors.