What was the first language you actually wrote something useful in?
Not the first one you typed hello world in. The first one where the program did a job you needed done and you kept using it.
For me it was a horrible little AWK script in about 1999 that reformatted my bank's statement export so I could paste it in a spreadsheet. I still have it somewhere. It has no comments and one variable called x2.
Curious what everyone else's was.
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QBasic. Program that worked out how much of each paint to buy for model aircraft. Dad used it more than I did.
sh. Nothing else was installed.
Excel macros, and I'm not sorry. Got me a raise before I knew what a loop was called.
I'm still working on this one to be honest! Started Python last year to help with marking. The first thing that actually saved me time was a script that renames the scanned worksheets using the class list. Took me a whole weekend and it saves about 20 minutes a term. Worth it anyway.
6502 assembly via a C64 monitor, because BASIC was too slow for the sprite routine I wanted. It wasn't useful as such, but it was useful to me
Java, sadly, and I've been paying for it since.
at least you got paid
Pascal in school. We made program for the school library, to track who has which book. Librarian used it three years until the computer died. I think nobody made backup.
Emacs Lisp. Yes it counts. Everything I've written since has been an attempt to get back to that feeling of redefining a function while it's running.
every lisp thread on every board, within ten posts
Perl CGI guestbook. Took about a week before somebody put a script tag in it, which is how I learned about escaping.
nils, we all have that guestbook.
Found this searching for something else. Mine was Visual Basic 6, a tool for my dad's shop that printed price labels. He ran it on the same machine until 2017.
Late to this as well but game maker language. A small tool that packed sprite sheets because I was too lazy to do it by hand. Then I wrote more tools than games, and that's still the problem.
This has been the nicest thread to get emails about, except that there are no emails, I just keep coming back to check. Joelle, 2017 is a fine run for VB6.