Geeks on Campus

For the last couple of weeks I have been learning Java programming. I’m doing this using a course called Java Programming Masterclass for Software Developers on Udemy.com. My first purpose of writing this post is to recommend this course. There is over 80 hours of video. I have been working on it for a couple of weeks and I’m only about a third of the way through. I’m really happy with the quality of the instruction and the platform. Check it out if you think you might be interested (wait for a sale, don’t pay full price).

The second purpose of this post is to document all of the different programming languages I’ve used over the years, mostly just for my own record.

Approx. 1985, 1988 – BASIC
All of the dates on this list are approximate, but this one especially. My first computer was the Radio Shack TRS-80. I would check books out from the library and re-type BASIC programs line-by-line from them. I later (don’t remember which grade) had a “computer” class in school where we did BASIC programming.

1992 – Turbo Pascal
This was a high school class. I was on a team that competed in programming competitions with this language.

1995 & 1996 – Quick Basic, C++ and Visual Basic
Programming classes in college. I did use Quick Basic some in my first IT job.

1998 – “Classic” Active Server Pages(ASP) & HTML
It wasn’t “Classic” back then. I wrote several ASP applications that were used on the company public website and our intranet. I also used ASP to support the web applications developed in our office (BG) when we were between programmers. I guess HTML is technically a mark-up language and not a programming language. But I really wanted to mention some of the HTML editors I used over the years.

Notepad, HoTMetaL, GoLive, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, Frontpage, Dreamweaver, Notepad++ (what I mostly use now). I’m sure there were others.

1999 – Visual Basic for Applications
This seems like an odd thing to include. But I was really proud of some of the things I developed with VBA. I had a really great book on it from Microsoft Press that I wish I still had. I created a purchase order system that would retrieve the next purchase order number from a central dataset so that all purchase orders in the company could use a sequential set of numbers instead of having to assign blocks of numbers to users.

2000 – Delphi
Hey look, it’s the PASCAL language again. I used Delphi Developer to program a Louver Specification Wizard software that American Warming and Ventilating (AWV) distributed to architects and manufacturer representatives to include AWV louvers in building specifications. The user would select a product and respond to a series of questions to generate a 10200 formatted specification on screen. The specification could also be saved to an RTF file.

2001 – Visual Basic .NET
I worked in Visual Basic .NET in collaboration with our corporate office on an online product catalog and order placing system.

2002 – FOCUS
I used FOCUS to write reports on our mainframe student information system. There was a short time where I think I might have been the most advanced FOCUS programmer on campus (after Janice retired and Erik graduated). I took over training new staff on FOCUS programming for some time.

2009 – PHP
I learned PHP because that is what our new web applications were being written in. I did re-write the AWV louver specification writer in PHP and put it online. The most interesting part of that was the code to generate an RTF file download. It also used a MySQL database back-end.

2020 – JAVA
This takes us back to Java.

Others
I’m not sure where to put JavaScript. I wrote some pretty complex web applications using JavaScript for interactivity and dynamic content.