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I first learnt FORTRAN at a university holiday job in 1970, which was also my first experience of computers. They had a PDPxx (xx=10? can't remember for sure), and they gave me a copy of Daniel D. McCracken's Guide to FORTRAN IV programming, and I basically taught myself FORTRAN (I found a copy on Amazon a few years ago). I wrote a couple of programs for the job, and fortunately they worked first time - I remember thinking that if they didn't work, I would have a lot of trouble debugging them. No comments, GO TOs all over the place, variable names such as AAA, BBB, etc etc (I was yet to learn about maintainability of programs...).

Then in 1971 at university I wrote some more FORTRAN in a unit of Applied mathematics, to solve some mathematical problem (they also had a PDP (something)). I remember I didn't get all the bugs out before I had to hand it in...

In 1974 I started work at a big company which used a S360, and they taught us PL/I, the main language used there. Unlike that holiday job, they taught the importance of comments, meaningful variable names etc. I used PL/I for nearly a year.

Then I transferred to a department where Fortran was used, and I remained in that department, and it's successors (there were reorganisations about every 5 minutes, it seemed....) for the rest of my time at the company. I used both Fortran and PL/I, and occasionally MARK IV, and eventually (after other staff left and the department didn't use so much Fortran) I became the de facto Fortran "go-to" person. When Fortran 77 (VS Fortran) arrived I did most of the testing for it.

I have always liked Fortran, and it is my favourite programming language.

I don't have much experience of programming languages on the PC. I could never quite get the hang of Visual Basic, with all it's objects, methods, properties etc etc, and I know nothing whatsoever about C. But I've used AutoIt (a bit like a simplified VB) a bit, and find it useful for a few things on my PC.

Tim