My first "job" was at a place that did a lot of crunching on big data (or what counted for big at the time). I'd go there after school and do things like rotate

My first "job" was at a place that did a lot of crunching on big data (or what counted for big at the time). I'd go there after school and do things like rotate the backup tapes. Until they found out I could, and then it got a lot more interesting. One of the things I loved about that experience was that I got to try a ton of programming languages. They'd use anything under the sun if it had a useful feature. A lot of it was compiled BASIC, but it was also my first exposure to C, Lisp, APL, and... SPITBOL. Which was the boss's favorite. It was a SNOBOL variant that they had a compiler for that ran on the 286 PCs of the day. I didn't write much, if anything, in it, but I remember the reason they liked it so much was because it had pattern matching features, kind of like how AWK and Perl made working with regexes trivial. The other memorable aspect as I recall was that every line of code could also contain not just one, but two GOTOs (I think one for success and one for failure), which made it a bit.. interesting.. to try to follow the flow.