Friday, January 21, 2011

That's 14

In my previous post, I listed all (I thought) the programming languages I have learned.  In a lecture this morning, I talked about another language I learned and used on the job, and realized that I had forgotten to list it.  It's the old RPG language.  RPG stands for Report Program Generator, though I understand it also stands for Rocket Propelled Grenade.  They both blow up, so that's OK.  That's 14 languages in 41 years, or an average of one new language every 2.9 years. 

I still see jobs listed for RPG programmers.  An RPG program is easy to write but impossible to maintain.   My advise is to avoid RPG like it was the stomach flu.

1 comment:

  1. You're WAY ahead of me. I count languages I "know" as those in which I've written at least one game.

    BASIC (a text adventure)
    FORTRAN (tic-tac-toe)
    QBasic (Mastermind clone)
    C (side scrolling shooter for MS Windows)
    C++ (3D Tetris for MS Windows)
    Java (Sudoku with hinting / solver)

    That's six since college, or one every six years. I'm not counting Pascal, Visual Basic, HTML, Perl, Python, and a few others that I sort of know (and in several cases taught) but never did anything serious with.

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