Basic: easy enough for me to write silly scripts on the old Apple at the back of the classroom Pascal: you kept me from falling in love with programming before

Basic: easy enough for me to write silly scripts on the old Apple at the back of the classroom Pascal: you kept me from falling in love with programming before I declared Physics Mathematica: your ability to solve symbolic equations is astounding IDL: you made it easy for me to produce ugly graphics and served as my union card with astronomers Perl: you helped me get to python so much faster C: getting good at you encouraged me to learn more about development best practices. basic debugging and version control make me a coding mastermind relative to my peers. S-Lang: you convinced me of the horrible dangers of Not Invented Here C++: you've kindly stayed out of code I've needed to do serious work with Python: you've got so many packages, half of my work is already done. Plus you painlessly taught me some OOP!