Thanks everyone. I e-mailed him link to Computerhope Forum so he can see what you all said.
Geek mentioned. "My first language was COBOL." in regards to how languages come and go of popularity.
First programming language for me was Basic on a TRS-80 Model 1 with 16k RAM. Most of Basic for TRS-80 I was able to use in GW-Basic on the IBM 8088 in the 1980s where I absolutely loved being able to use colors and sound because I liked making video games and programs with color appeal when 10 years old. I used GW-Basic up until QBasic with DOS 5.0 in the early 90s. But instead of programming in QBasic newer structure I stuck it out with the Basic legacy support for using line numbers because I found that much easier to control and I absolutely LOVED using GOTO statements to jump to anywhere in the program. When I went to college in 1998 though I was introduced to C++ and my college professor broke me out of the use of spaghetti code. I was at first excited when I saw that C++ had support for goto statements, but the professor said I am going to break you from that habit a for everything can be nested in loops and goto's are poor programming. And it worked I no longer use goto's and came forward to object oriented programming.
Back in 1998 the college I went to had 2 options for programming language path, where once you chose the language you had to take 3 courses in it of Intro, Intermediate, and Advanced programming. The choice was the path of Visual Basic or C++ for your degree. I chose C++ because I didnt want to be stuck in a Microsoft OS only platform and C++ was available for many different OS's as well as you didnt have to use a Microsoft provided IDE, so I actually started off with Borland C++ 4.02 which came bundled with Borland C++ 4.02 book from Waldenbooks Store on discount for $9.99. The college book we had had a student edition CD in the back of it of Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 and every program you compiled had the text in the compiled program stating it was compiled using student edition - educational purpose only. I liked that Borland allowed me to compile programs that didnt have this annoyance. However there were some differences between Borland and Microsoft C++ that caused issues when compiling such as one of them required the .h preference to inclusions while the other was fine with #INCLUDE <IOSTREAM> without having to specify #INCLUDE<IOSTREAM.H> which caused some interesting head scratching when sometimes it wasnt completely obvious as to why a syntax wasnt quite right for Borland but I got all my programs to run with it and my professor let me use Borland C++ on my laptop as everyone else was doing their work on Microsoft Visual C++.
These days I dabble in C++, C#, Perl, and Python mostly. A few years ago I was surfing the web and found an online IDE environment for Basic which allowed you to enter code into a window and tell it to compile and run and it would run your Basic code through browser which was interesting but it didnt have a way to save your work other than copy/pasting it out of the workspace in the browser window. So it couldnt be used to compile programs to use, it was there as a place for people to mess with Basic I guess for free without installing or adding an IDE to their system.
