What was your first programming language? What is/are your most used?

My first was Matlab. Most used is probably python, and then you get into my professional niche, VHDL, C, TCL.

High school
- Sophmore Year
  - Pascal
  - Delphi (not necessarily a “language” but it did change things just enough to make it different)
- Junior Year
  - C++
  - Java
- Senior Year
  - C++
  - Microsoft Turbo Assembly (16-bit)
College
- Freshman Year
  - Java
  - C++
- Sophmore Year
  - C++
  - Assembly for TI microcontroller (EE/CE course)
- Junior Year
  - Python (Networking courses)
  - C# (Algorithm Design course)
  - Racket (Computer Language/Interpreter course)
  - Julia (Computer Language/Interpreter course)
  - R (Bayesian Stats course)
- Senior Year
  - Python (all courses allowed personal choice)

I mostly use Python personally and dabble in Rust for learning purposes. I was staunchly anti-Python in my freshman year of college because I was helping a friend figure out why his Python script for CS 100 wasn’t working and I had never used it before, and the idea of whitespace indentation used for scoping seemed ridiculous (amplified by the discovery that my friend had mixed both in his lines). However after starting an on-campus job as a network engineer between my sophomore and junior year I found Python to be ideal for rapid prototyping and automation. Funny how that immediate reversal of opinion occurred.

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l_b_i 2 points 2 years ago

With Matlab being my first, indexing from 1 made sense. After learning and writing basically everything else, 1 is just wrong.

import flying

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StraightCodingWolf 2 points 2 years ago

Gosh I couldn’t get used to that in Julia. Threw everything off that semester.

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l_b_i 2 points 2 years ago

Don't know about Julia, but your probably writing matlab "wrong" if you're using indexes. (I've never used matlab correctly, but its not really my field). Its always confusing though.

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StraightCodingWolf 2 points 2 years ago

Julia embraces it. It’s intended to be used as a general-purpose scripting language focused on data/numerical analysis with parallel computing baked in. So indexing is a core part of its syntax. And since it caters to mathematicians, they began with indexing to start from 1 for familiarity. (Eventually they added support to define if your code has indexing starting from 0 or 1.)

R for my stats class really threw me off. Syntax was kinda comparable to Python but the way in which you can assign data to an object (which I think was both possible via index or dot-operator) meant I had to “forget” some things to not be lost when reading a TA’s example.

In summary, I’ll stick with Python/C/C++/Rust and leave Matlab/R/Julia to the mathematicians.

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