James Tauber has a post up where he goes through a list of languages he’s learned in chronological order. Thought it was neat, so here’s mine. I’m not including anything I only dabbled in, like Erlang or Ruby.

• BASIC Apple ][

• HyperTalk On my dad’s Macintosh SE. I remember trying (unsuccessfully) to make a Myst clone.

• Logo Fear the turtle! I actually taught this in summer camp in 2002. Logo had progressed at that point where you could launch new threads to do things like make a basketball dribble autonomously whilst a player ran down the court.

• TI-BASIC On the TI-83. Gave me something to do during Algebra. Highlight? Writing a Legend of the Red Dragon clone. I can still type faster on the TI-83 than I can on most smartphones.

• C Picked up a book. It was something like Learn C on the Macintosh. It included a stripped down version of the Metrowerks compiler.

• HTML/CSS There wasn’t much of CSS at that point. Ah, Geocities. My first site was about cheat codes for the game genie.

• C++ In high school. Using the old Borland Turbo C++ suite. I miss it sometimes. There was a note of elegance to its expanses of pixelated text and blue.

• Perl In high school. At Whitman, a bunch of us wrote an online homework submission system in Perl, and tied it in to me school directory. Interesting times, though at its peak, only about half the teachers used it.

• PHP In high school. Used it because I wanted a blog and I didn’t like pushing via FTP with Blogger (still operated by Pyra at the time).

• Java In college. I use the term “learn” loosely. I’ve forgotten most of it.

• C++ In college. More C++ stuff.

• Bash/shell scripting I brough my old PowerMac 8500 tower into college. At the time, it was running LinuxPPC. I had a version of mkLinux running on an old-world PowerMac at home, so the PowerMac 8500 felt like a speed demon to me. Eventually switched over to Debian PPC, before dumping it all for a Powerbook running OS X 10.1.

• Python In college. Python rocks. I got into it because it seemed to disdain so much of what I hated about Perl.

• Javascript Post college. Most of my Javascript knowledge comes from on-the-job experiences. Decent language, if having a larger share of implementation quirks than normal.

• Objective-C Again, I use the term “learn” loosely. Like what I saw, even if the super verbose parameter names still drive me batty sometimes.

• Actionscript 3 Learned this for a Flash project. In many ways, feels like Javascript Done Right.