Comment by minder-4001

Tracking Russian satellites at school, one of the younger teachers had an account on the local university computer. He did data reduction and orbit calculations in Fortran and showed me the code, letting me try simple stuff. I found the spherical trig nasty, but the Fortan easy to understand.

Shortly after at Uni I wrote a dating system for the Rag Committee (UK thing to raise money for local charities) whilst learning other languages. Had fun with it and annoyed a few people.

Got a job with ICL and they taught me more languages and let me write some useful software as well as some outside-work fun stuff.

These days I use Python, bash and SQL, with occasional Perl. Some of the languages I used to know have completely disappeared like S3, Snowball, Pop3, 1900 assembler and so on.