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It’s been months since I received a Meme Tag, so I decided to invite myself to take part in a Meme from Aaron Feng.

How old were you when you first started programming?

Now, that really would be telling and would give away my age. Let’s just say that I was lucky enough to get a Sinclair ZX81 for Christmas 1981, and never really looked back.

How did you get started in programming?

All my friends were getting Atari games console’s, but I got a stinking ZX81 with 1K of memory… actually a bit less than that, since a few hundred bytes were reserved for system variables, and had to write my own games.

What was your first language?

Afrikaans. Followed by English, and then Sinclair BASIC.

What was the first real program you wrote?

Mars Mining Corporation. After 6 months of typing in other peoples BASIC code from printouts in magazines, I acquired a 4K RAM Pack for my ZX81, and wrote a fun text only simulation for making money out of running a mining company on Mars.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Chronologically, as best as I can remember:

Sinclair Basic, Z80 assembler, BBC Basic, 6502 Assembler, Amstrad BASIC, Pascal, LPC, MUF Modula-2, APL, Forth, C, YACC, Oberon, Occam-2, Modula-3, C-shell, C++, Prolog, Bourne Shell, sed, Emacs Lisp, AWK, M4, Scheme, Tcl/Tk, Cobol, PCL5, D, Brainfuck, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, SQL, PHP4, Lua, AppleScript…

And then there are a whole slew of XML based and inspired languages I’ve had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with over the years:

SGML, CSS2, CSS3, XHTML, XSL, Glade XML, YAML, RDF, DAML+Oil, JSON, DTD, RSS, Atom, SAX…

Plus some proprietary languages I can’t remember the names of, and quite probably several more languages that I’ve forgotten about.

What was your first professional programming gig?

My first job after graduating was fixing bugs in support software for Independent Financial Advisors, back in 1994.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

I would have started sooner if I’d been able to talk my Dad into buying a PDP-11…

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Study other people’s code. Free Software is an education!

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

Libtool, obviously. How could I not enjoy writing M4 code that generates portable Bourne Shell code on the developers machine, which in turn runs on the users machine to generate C code to interact with code libraries? I was meta-programming before I even knew what it meant :-)

Who’s next?

James Urquhart