Inspired by a recent poll here about C#(.NET) vs Java, where the clear winner from comments was actually Python (+1) I thought about the entertainment of language wars and for this mid-summer period throw out a walk-down-memory lane poll. Which of these pre-internet era languages do you swear you really swear as true that you actually programmed in at school or at work or home? Comment the ones that you loved and those you hated, what you found magical or frustrating, how you came across the language or any other memory these languages provoke.  I know there are many more, these are just the ones I remember clearly, but add your favourite pre-internet langauge in the comments.

Thanks to BASIC I’d got into this gig. The awesomeness I had when I coded my first videogame was outstanding.

Where is RPG on this list.  Still being used today but in a different form (RPG Free)

My favorite was Assembler. You could actually read what was in memory, what was in registers, what instructions were executed in the error dumps. Pure science

I am really surprised by the low COBOL turn-out :-)

I can't vote on my own poll, but I fell in love with REXX, hated Pascal, but raised a positive eyebrow at Delphi. I was better at Fortran than at Cobol, and despise Basic as much as I hate to love Perl. But Lisp was cool as cucumbers even though I wasted too much of my time in Logo. The root of my education in this area, and I think the spark of a career was Assembler, and a University class in Logic.