I learned to program on Apple II computers at school in 1984. My best friend Robin and I worked through a course on BASIC from Minnesota that came on floppy discs. We kids took turns working on the course in pairs on the one computer that the class had. Personal computers were still very new at the time, and the school only had a few.

Robin and I made Mad-Libs programs and other fun things, and I also made a low-resolution drawing program where you could maneuver a "cursor" around the screen, drawing lines as you moved. You could even change the color of the pixels you were drawing as you went around the screen, creating a picture in a manner similar to that of an etch-a-sketch.

Later I would learn a bit of the logo programming language, and then much later, in college, I learned some perl, fortran, and c.

In a programming class, I made a mild bit-scrambling encryption program in c [1]. I used fortran for one of my engineering classes, but not for my personal projects.

[1] I did not use any rigorous fancy math (as robust encryption software programs do), I just did a lot of bit-shifting and practiced writing in c, because I was a beginner. It was a useful exercise for a class, not something that would provide real security for any truly sensitive secret message.

My favorite programming language is perl. <3 I learned it totally on my own, not in a class. I had bought the pink version of "the camel book", Programming Perl, back in 1992, and fell in love with it instantly.

When I was in college, I was part of a social circle of students who used a simple text chat line called the Haven, developed by a kid at Purdue University who called himself The Insane Hermit.

I made several chatbots for the Haven in perl using the simple tcp/ip client code that was printed in the Programming Perl book as a base. I had so much fun with this that perl became cemented as my favorite programming language for good.

Over the years since college, I have done several more perl projects, pretty much just small personal tools and explorations. I am a dabbler and a dilettante, not an expert. :)

I made a word frequency visualization tool, a photo annotation program, rolled my own blog using perl cgi files [2], and did a bunch of exploring and experimenting.

[2] I did a proof of concept / prototype, but haven't written much blog content in anything I created myself. I used software written by other people when I was blogging in earnest around the turn of the millenium.

Nowadays I use python, a little bit of raku [3], and perl still (and probably always).

[3] Raku is what they call perl 6 now. It's different enough that they decided to give it a different name, and perl 5 is still perl and is still around, fortunately.