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Ford Aerospace in the 1980's.
Ada was the designated language for the embedded x86 systems but it wasn't ready for prime time, so someone (AF) came up with the idea that JOVIAL was acceptable as an interim design/test language. I've had the same experience with other AF technologies over the years.
It's been fun watching the reinvention of concepts and the gradual assimilation of stuff like functional programming into the "new" languages. FORTH? LISP? ABC?
In the end, it's how we render the algorithm into machine instructions (macro/micro) and how we can make sure our high-level code describes the problem completely, efficiently, and without failures.
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This was all the rage at the time.
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Actually it was about 1976 when I was programming in FORTRAN IV. I can still remember when someone managed to get a copy of Fortran for their PC.
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I was using Fortran IV in 1990 on a Prime mini - no character type so bit shifting integers to get at individual characters was fun.
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FORTRAN II and then FORTRAN IV and then Fortran-77
although my first language was an assembly language I can't even remember the name of, ie. not just "Assembler".
Since then:
COBOL
Coral-66
PL/1
Pascal & Delphi
Basic (a dozen different varieties up to VB.NET)
Rexx (marvelous fun)
Java (a thankfully brief, painful experience)
C, C++ and now C# and JavaScript.
Oh, and I also invented a couple of languages myself (for specialised applications - more macro languages than anything).
[edit] Oops, I just remembered SQL (does that count as a real language?
also 6502 assembler (and some other assembler languages I can't remember).
and Clipper (for DBase III+) - and a bit of EasyTrieve.
I almost learned APL and Prolog but managed to avoid them by the skin of my teeth.
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...
modified 1-Oct-12 13:32pm.
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Can't remember which was first but both about the same time.
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I am surprised that someone else's first (formally learned) programming language was (or may have been) PL/1. I don't think it ever made the top 20 (I've never seen a single line of non-student code in my life).
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Yeah it was an odd language and never used it or saw anyone use it out of class. We learned Pascal shortly after that and it was a much superior language but never used it either. I did use assembly a lot when I first got out of college then quickly taught myself C, C++ and finally C#.
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If memory serves, it was an attempt on IBM's part to replace COBOL and Fortran with one language so they would have fewer compilers to support. It had structured programming constructs that neither of the other languages had. I learned it out of curiosity and then ended up using it for one program. I was working on a Wang VS mini-computer and was given a data file to process from an IBM mainframe. It had both 32-bit integer data and packed data. The COBOL compiler couldn't handle the integer values and the C compiler didn't know what packed data was. PL/1 could handle both, or I would have had to write a complex billing report in assembler.
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I used SPL which was a PL/1 derivative on the Primos OS - a lot of the systems code was written in SPL and as we had a source code licence I learned it from that (and a Fortran to PL/1 reference book from the library - which had never been taken out before) and developed my first compiler in it. PL/1 was a bit unwieldy but the sub sets such as SPL were often excellent
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Don't remember a thing about PL/1 and very little Fortran other than a lot of people on campus used it for math.
My first job out of college was on the Apple II ProDOS OS and assember. Learned a lot that year!
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I don't recall much of PL/1 other than it was my first introduction to pointers- I do recall emjoying it however
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But I use several of them on daily basis.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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But I completely forgot about you when I voted.
That was my first attempt at programming, the Flag of the World program I remember copying in from a book.
The C64 died when I had just finished writing a simple game, went to fetch my mum to show here, she touched the keyboard and it turned off, never to show any signs of life again.
Cannot remember what we programmed in at school, the machines were all Nimbus and were one of the most advanced schools in the area for computers, remember making a series of teletext pages for one assignment, that may even have been before they got the Nimbus.
At Uni we learnt Modulo-2 and Assembly in the first year, later some C. In the final year we were taught Java and the lecturer confidently said it was the future and we didn't need to know anything else.
Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.
Shed Petition[ ^]
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Ditto, hours spent copying lines of code from magazines only to presented with Syntax Error on running.
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That brings back memories of PCW with a Pet and C64 
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What are the Top 20 most popular programming languages? Without knowing that, the question is moot.
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Thanks! I must have missed it.
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You didn't "miss" it - the CSS for it was poorly designed. Links are not sufficiently colored any more with the new layout.
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Yup, i had to look many times to realize, that there was a link in this sentence 
For the sake of the survey we'll use this list as our Top 20
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No Commodore 64 for me like most of you guys! 
Got it when I was around 8 and learned BASIC from the commands on the last page of the manual 
Almost 30 years later I still code and keep thinking what on earth made me like these machines so much... oh well, maybe is as innate for me as loving women!
Cheers!
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Another Sinclair fan here - I started with ZX Spectrum 48k. Hey, it had whole 48 kilobytes of RAM, 16 Kb of ROM and the CPU (Z80A) was running at almost 4 MHz. What a machine 
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Amazing how we had so much fun with so less power.
In fact, if we speak about games, I can't remember having as much fun with these super productions as I had with BombJack, Rick Dangerous, Chuckie Egg, Target Renegade!!
Oh well...
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