I started with machine codes. Followed by ASM, Turbo Pascal, C/C++. I played with BASIC but quickly dismissed it as it would greatly limit of what I could do (I

I started with machine codes. Followed by ASM, Turbo Pascal, C/C++. I played with BASIC but quickly dismissed it as it would greatly limit of what I could do (I was hooking computers to devices using high speed parallel bus and processing data in real time). No college. I was studying physics in university. All my programming experience I got by looking at docs and somebody else's codes. Of course every once in a while I would use something like Matlab to solve my little problems and when I switched to develop software for living I also used many other languages. Now I mostly free to choose whatever tools I see fit and usually stick to 3 - C++ for backends, Delphi/Lazarus for desktops and JavaScript for web front ends. Occasionally use C when I have to do firmware. I played up to my gills with many scripting languages like Python. Personally I found that on any project of decent size they do not speed up development at all. The performance loss of the end product however is monumental.