On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 5:21 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
I know that I'm gonna be outclassed here, but I taught myself BASIC,
ALGOL, and FORTRAN (ugh! well, it was WATFOR then WATFIV) from my school
days in the late 60s onwards.
Many much older and more experienced than I on this list.  I'm a relative youngster that started in the late 1960s.  So Dave, I have to say, ditto, but I will add a couple of assemblers to the early list (360 BAL, HP2000, and PDP-8 and 10).  My father showed me the GE-635 assembler in probably 1968, but I never managed to write anything meaningful in it.

COBOL tried to be drilled into me, but I firmly rejected it (but for some
odd reason I still know it, but deny all knowledge of it).
Funny, I dodged COBOL, but not PL/1 and APL. With the latter, I maintained the York/APL interpreter on TSS for a bit.  I also saw a number of languages on the 10's like SAIL, SNOBOL, and over course BLISS.  All before I saw C on the Fifth Edition of UNIX.  As I've said before, when I first saw it, I was not impressed.  Little did I know Dennis and Ken would rot my brain - (and I'm thankful that they did).

Clem