How many programming languages do you know? (Let us know which ones in the comments)
Displaying poll results.13619 total votes.
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Guess (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm guessing there's going to be a wide divide between people who count only ones they can do in a vacuum (no Internet searches, IDE, book references or reference code) and ones that count anything they ever did for a short period of time.
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I went with "stuff I know without having to look anything up." and by that standard I think I'm at 5 languages. I can read a book over a weekend and write functional code on a Monday morning, but don't ask me what it means two months later unless I've been using that language pretty much the whole time.
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> Or have funny ideas about how apis don't change
POSIX
Re: Guess (Score:2)
GWBASIC
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I knew Commodore 64 BASIC.
Re: Guess (Score:2)
Actually the first BASIC I learned was Wang BASIC on a Wang 2200 (in 1975, five years before the IBM PC came out), but I didnâ(TM)t think anyone would remember that.
However, I had already learned a half-dozen languages in college before that (COBOL, 360/ASM, FORTRAN, PL/1, etc), and IITRAN in high school in 1970.
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Cool, I was two years old in 1970. I like how many veterans are on this site, telling about the days before PCs.
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Pepperidge farm remembers, and me too. Wang BASIC on a 2200 was my first language and the 2200 with dual 5 1/4" floppies my first computer.
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I knew a few back in my student days but I never used them after that and I'm not interested in programming for fun so I entered Zero.
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Right?
I called it zero, because I still have a lot of things to learn about the, I guess now one, that I use regularly. I have a vague idea what I don't know, and there are years of learning ahead of me.
Many that I might have been very, very good at at one point in my life I've largely lost in the sands of time. I mean, it didn't ask, "how many have you ever been semi-proficient at?" That's a very different question.
And honestly, I'm not sure what it would take for me to say I "know" a language. The more yo
Re: Guess (Score:2)
If I included the ones I can do but not well, it'd be pushing close to 16-17. Shit like lua and C++ , I can do it but not really comfortably if I take ones I'm comfortable in maybe 10 -12
And to the younger coders that might sound like a lot but it's just 30 years of coding. I still count small talk and forth in "shit I do well" even though the odds of encountering them in the wild these days is low.
It kind of reminded me of the time I asked an old, 50ishyo, party dude , back in my late teens, how many wom
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I'm not sure what of substance you can do these days without some form of search, reference, deep grepping or sample code. Knowing all the arguments and format specifiers for printf is useful, but the number of places you can or want to use printf in production code are growing increasingly rare.
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Well, I just counted the languages I've written production release software in. I skipped the ones I've fixed bugs in, that I've code reviewed, that I've only used academically, that I've dabbled at home with.
That still gets me into double figures. Get good at one language, you rapidly find yourself capable in others. Learning/researching the various libraries and best practices takes time but language basics tend to be trivial.
Functional languages are a different matter. One day I'll get around to learning
How many have I forgotten? (Score:3)
I used to be fluent in PASCAL, Apl, basic, forth, Mathematica, pl1, labview G, Igor, matlab
I used to use c, c++, FORTRAN, Java, and JavaScript.
These days it's all python, perl, and a little bash.
But the thing is, with python I still am using my knowledge of matlab, cuda FORTRAN, and a lot of other things I learned in other languages but that are now python libraries or contexts like Numba..
I still use Perl because it's a leatherman pocket multi-tool and wood chipper for text processing. Python is more of
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But I can't do PAL anymore (assembler for DEC PDP-8) even though it was my main duty for several years.
Of course you can; you just need a reference machine or simulator, and a reference guide with the op codes. The question doesn't imply a required fluency without consulting a reference resource. I'd suspect only a small percentage of employed software developers can use a simple text editor and pump out working code without some form of reference aid.
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But I can't do PAL anymore (assembler for DEC PDP-8) even though it was my main duty for several years.
If you want to while away an afternoon, download SIMH and one of the PDP-8 kits.
Re: How many have I forgotten? (Score:2)
Really, Forth? I know why I learned (and long ago forgot) that one, but in any case it was to rewrite the Mac bootloader. I think it's main use was embedded systems. It was a neat stack based language, but not for the faint at heart.
I had to choose 6+ in just the past year (some I've used for years, others months). C/C++ I'm relatively on top of (still do some OSS in those) and work is all Java (8 right now, may move up soon), JavaScript, PHP and Python (God I hate PHP and Python, but non-programmers are co
Re: Guess (Score:5, Insightful)
Levels of "Knowing" a language:
1) You can read and understand what the code does
2) You modify existing code to do something different
3) You can write code from scratch that does what you want
4) You can fully utilize the language syntax and its libraries
5) You write programs with the language for things people don't even imagine and use it in ways people barely believe
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writing tenth and tenth of thousands of line of code
So, hundreds?
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Only 2 Languages (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Only 2 Languages (Score:2)
You have a bug in your code. The Hello has to be quoted.
What is Your Most Obscure One? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know a bunch of languages that nobody uses. Forth, Oberon, etc. And I'm currently trying to learn an evolutionary language called Push. I think learning obscure languages makes you a better programmer in more traditional languages because it stretches your brain.
Re:What is Your Most Obscure One? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does x86 assembly count as a language? I've only seen it used in the x264 encoder project and nowhere else.
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I think that it does. I was coding test rigs in x86 assembly in the 90s to stress-test hardware. It is astonishing how fast stuff runs when you're right above the hardware! I'm pretty sure you can still do in-line assembly in GCC.
Re:What is Your Most Obscure One? (Score:5, Funny)
No, x86 assembly counts as masochism -- because it is self-inflicted pain compared to most other major ISA's.
Especially if you code 16-bit x86 assembly and have to change the segment registers all the time to do something useful.
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Does x86 assembly count as a language?
Sure. I wrote my Forth compiler in it, so it must be a language.
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I know a bunch of languages that nobody uses. Forth, Oberon, etc.
I wrote Forth code yesterday. Today it was mostly PHP and a bit of Lisp; tomorrow it'll be mostly Bash. But on the weekend, I'll be back at Forth again.
Learning multiple languages helps you to think of your solution in an abstract way, not tied to any specific language. Then, when you have your solution, you can reach for the one best suited to implementing that.
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John Likes Prolog.
Prolog likes Mary.
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Prolog is a dog.
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I wrote a whole bunch of code in Algol 60 when I was at Uni, since I got free time on the Maths department ICL mainframe, and that was by far and away the most sophisticated language on it. I wrote a poem-writing program that composed poetry that was random nonsense. But it did rhyme!
I wrote some POP-2 on the same machine, which came from the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at Edinburgh. Plus ca change and all that.
I've written code in
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I don't even remember what it was called on the PC side. I did some BASIC programming on a dedicated IBM system in my first full time programming job. Some company wrote a compiler for it for the IBM PC so I maintained a Funeral Home package written in it. The system was pretty obscure in that supposedly only two people in the DC area admitted to knowing how to use it and I was one of them :)
I did some poking around in several others like Forth back in the 80's and 90's. Most languages I use today I have to
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Speaking of obscure languages, how about Q, or K? I can't really claim to "know" them let alone use professionally, but I fucked around with them a bit.
Otherwise I'm more or less familiar and use/use to some degree:
Delphi, Perl, SQL, C#, VB, C, C++ (templates count separately right), Scala, JavaScript.
My knowledge in them is hardly encyclopedic though, like I couldn't quote you from the standard what the deal with::abs and std::abs is supposed to be.
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https://groups.csail.mit.edu/c... [mit.edu]
It's also my favorite language.
It came about when a bunch of MIT PhDs got a Darpa grant to consider "what should the internet be like if you didn't need backward-compatibility with HTML for a markup language". Since it's MIT, the answer for everything was "lisp", and they observed that HTML/XML is a horrible syntax similar to s-expressions; and that lisp is a powerful language .... and decided to merge them.
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My most obscure language was ObjectVision, from Borland back in the 90's.
Next most obscure - Algol, also in the 90's.
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I once chatted with the fellow who invented LISP, following up on a slashdot Q&A he did where he broke programming languages into (IIRC) more than 10 categories of language types and gave a few examples of each.
His view was that languages are tools and each has strengths and weaknesses and programmers should learn at least one from each category to understand that kind of programming tool and what it is or is not good for.
He gave me a respect for *why* LISP existed (something I did not get from my surve
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A long time ago a good friend and mentor of mine was telling me about a special-purpose language that he had written. I asked him what it was written in and he told me it was written in the language itself. At the time that blew my mind.
Thank you for sharing your experience with John McCarthy [wikipedia.org]. I didn't realize that he originally coined the term "Artificial Intelligence". His contributions to the field of computer science are sobering. Sadly, he died in 2011.
After 25 years as a professional developer (Score:4, Insightful)
I have some degree of experience with a whole bunch of languages, but the ones I use most frequently, in descending order, are C, C++, Java, Papyrus (Bethesda games scripting language), PHP, Python, and x86 assembly. As someone else said in this thread, knowing specific languages isn't that important in the real world, because as long as you understand the programming paradigm they operate under (OO, imperative, etc) it's pretty easy to move from one to the other.
Re:After 25 years as a professional developer (Score:5, Insightful)
True. The hard parts of a new language is often not the language itself but about getting familiar with its standard library.
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I know a bunch (Score:2)
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The poll raises three questions:
What constitutes a language?
Do you count closely related languages separately?
How well do you know a language?
It would be more informative if the poll spelled those out. My preference would be:
List general purposes languages, not task specific languages. (Python, yes. HTML, no.)
C variants count as one. Assembly variants count as one. Shell scripts count as one.
List languages you actually used to create something.
Unfortunately, the universe refuses to bend to my will, no ma
many (Score:2)
Too many (Score:2)
Started out with Basic, Fortran, 6502 assembly, 8080 assembly. moved on to Cobol, Pascal, C, then C++, Perl and Java. PHP and Javascript. Most recently Python. C/C++, PHP, Javascript, Perl and Python would probably be the ones I'd consider usable these days, but Perl has been primary for the last decade or so though.
What do you mean by "know"? (Score:2)
Started out with Apple Basic, started to learn Pascal on the Mac, then moved on to C, C++, Bash Shell Scripting, Sparc Assembly, Java, PHP, MySQL, Objective-C, JavaScript, Python, CMD, ASP.net, Visual Basic 6, Swift, iScript (don't ask) and PowerShell. Some of those I know quite well, others, I've only dabbled with. And still others I haven't used in years, but could probably get back up to snuff in a few days.
I used to teach Bash Shell, CMD, Java & ASP.net at a community college. Now, I teach a web dev
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He likely means broken, fucked, non-standard SQL, as used by MySQL.
All flavors of SQL have extensions, MySQL doesn't do the standard stuff right.
Too many to count (Score:2)
Started with Basic on a ZX spectrum, around the age of 7-8. Was the first half of the '80s. I then learned to structure my code and began to prefer procedural stuff in my teens (pascal, C). Gradually I began to learn to structure more and began coding in Delphi.
During my college years I began coding in object oriented languages in earnest (C++, Java), and learned what functional programming is. Not that I have written a lot of code that way, but some principles are useful. Did some assembly stuff (68K, x86
For some definitions of "know" (Score:2)
Although I haven't used some in so long they are all but forgotten:
I do not count: HTML, CSS, SQL, Expect, sed.
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I'm about the same, our low id show our age :)
I can add Eiffel and caml (horrible, this one is horrible)
I'm old, there are many (Score:2)
Assemblers: Z80, 8088/86 etc, 68HC11, PDP11
Basic, C, Fortran, PL/N, Turbo Pascal / Delphi
Forth (in assembler, in OS/2)
One of these days I'll learn python properly, but I've written a few scripts in it.
I keep getting "Oh yeah" moments (Score:2)
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Matlab doesn't really count as a language.
A=[1, 2 -3, 4];
A(3)
Answer: -3 (WTF?)
[1, 2, 3, 4](3)
Error
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Good programmers work with a plethora of languages (Score:2)
My strength and love is "C" and more recently come to enjoy Erlang. Currently work in NodeJS Javascript. Been studying Rust with growing admiration, though not had occasion to use it yet. Wrote a hosted Forth interpreter in C (yeah I know) just for fun and curiosity. Worked with Lua and Rexx, both of which are great. Have done lots of Shell (Ksh, Bash) scripting. Wrote cyber cafe time management system for Windows in Java. Done some work in C#, which is surprisingly good given it was created by Micr
I'm Old, so are the languages on my list (Score:2)
FORTRAN IV - 77
C
PASCAL
PL/I
Assembler (68000 series, 6502/65816 series)
Perl
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Lots... (Score:2)
FORTRAN, COBOL, Java, JavaScript, ruby, assembly (arm, intel, 6502, intel), c/c++/objc, BASIC, LISP, Prolog, Pascal
I think thatâ(TM)s it.
A lot (Score:2)
How to divde the question? (Score:2)
I decided to list the last 3 I've worked in and the 3 I regard as my most fluent:
Python, Perl, and JavaScript for most recently used fairly seriously.
In my professional programming days it was mostly dBase II (really dates me), Lisp (probably Common), and Pascal (several versions, but mostly Turbo).
I said more than 6, so I need a 7th, but there are a bunch of languages that I used to some degree, sometimes for pay, sometimes for fun. In rough chronological order I remember Basic (many versions), Fortran (se
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Typo in the last line.
s/can couple/can wait a couple/
Also I should have said that some of them were for classes. For example, I first used APL in a class with the actual APL keyboards, though later on it was with the dot sequences for all the weird characters. Can't remember, but I think the display was able to show the APL font, even though the input was dot sequences...
I scanned a bunch of the other comments, and surprised not to find any major omissions from my rather offhand list.
I voted “more than 6” (Score:2)
But it’s unclear how we’re supposed to treat languages we have known but haven’t used in a couple decades - for me that would include stuff like FORTRAN, Pascal, x86 Assembly, Basic. If we’re supposed to include those, the max entry on this poll probably should’ve been higher.
What counts? (Score:2)
A bunch (Score:2)
BASIC (Atari), Visual Basic (I'm not proud), C, C++, Java, Javascript, PHP, Python
Query, styling, markup, and scripting languages I know that shouldn't count as programming languages:
HTML, CSS, SQL, Shellscripting, batch scripting, PowerShell, Asterisk dialplans
How many languages have you WRITTEN? (Score:2)
most "real" programmers are going to have to answer "more than 6" if they think about it...
So then what about: How many (Turing complete) programming languages have you devised and written (implemented)?
Me, about 4-5... (of course they would have to be counted in the How many languages you know bin as well...)
Julia (Score:2)
I'm a mathematical modeller, and currently doing most of my work in Julia.
Other than that I use (or have used) R, C++, GNU Octave, Matlab, Maple, Java, and Bash. I've delved into a few others but not actually written anything useful in them.
Oh, and LaTeX if you count that (it's Turing complete).
Does WhiteSpace Count? (Score:2)
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One of my students tried to pull Whitespace on me this last semester. I think I got him back in the final, when he had one of the lower scores...
6? (Score:2)
Really? 6 is the number you thought would be a good cutoff? I would have put ranges up to at least 15...
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Agreed. If you're doing almost anything involving modern systems you end up having to know a bunch of languages just to interact with different parts of the system. EG any modern web framework you need to know at least JavaScript as well as the base language of the framework (Rails/Ruby, Django/Python, Play/Java...).
I code regularly in Ruby, C++, and pure C but I end up having to know Java, JavaScript and Lua to maintain other parts of the systems I'm working on. Aside from that we have tools written in Pyt
Seriously? I mean really? (Score:2)
I'd've thought that slashdot is deep enough into this sort of thing to know that "knowing a programming language" is an extremely flexible term. To such a degree, that the phrase itself is less than meaningless. Over the course of my career and lifetime I've programmed in probably in excess of 30 PLs. Really know do I perhaps two or three. And even in those there are gaps, because of features and functions I don't need or have external solutions for.
Bottom line:
18 years of slashdot and this is the dumbest p
My languages (Score:2)
C
Python - Django (if a platform counts as a Language, this line counts as two)
HTML
Ass(8x86 and 6510, this should count as two)
Cobol
Fortran
Clipper
Pascal (if counts as a Language)
Basic (several variants)
Lisp
Rexx
So my friends, if the size was important, my CV section of languages would be not so bad. I guess there are some others that I do not remember they even exists right now. But the point is that "it is not the size but how good you
C++ - a romance (Score:2)
Over my 30+ year programming career, the languages I've used have modulated somewhat. At first, it was all C (in the real world - not counting college). Well, that and various assembly languages. I had a brief flirtation with an early, buggy, version of Ada. Eventually, I reached a breaking point, where the complexity of my projects exceeded the capacity of C. I dived headlong into C++, which became my base language. Around this time I also started doing significant amounts of Bash scripting - pretty much b
I voted for 1 (Score:2)
I spent years coding in BASIC, throughout the 1980's on 8-bit computers like the Tandy CoCo 2 and 3, the Apple //e, the TI 99/4a and several others. It may have been 30 years since I touched it, but I still think I could jump back in and remember most of it without a problem if I had to do it today. (Exceptions might be all the obscure stuff people used to do on specific models of machines using POKE and PEEK commands. I definitely don't have those memorized anymore.)
When things moved beyond BASIC, I lost
Crappy Polling Question is Crappy (Score:2)
Languages that I have worked in:
QBasic
VB
C++
COBOL
Assembler for ARM
HTML - It's a langauge
SQL
T-SQL
PL/SQL
J++
MD or MarkDown Language
C
Python
Java
Then some various implementations of everything above.
That doesn't really make me proficient in anything. I just get around.
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I forgot:
BASH,
Batch Script
KSH
PowerShell
and
PHP
Not A Programmer (Score:2)
I've written code in PERL, Python, C (just plain C, none of your fancy C+#^ stuff, you young whippersnappers), Java, and REXX that was used to support business processes in production. But honestly, I wouldn't say I know any of those languages - if I don't have a reference available, I'm lost. I "know" those languages like someone with a pocket phrasebook "knows" a foreign language.
Functional is my favourite style... (Score:2)
Languages (Score:2)
Depends on how you defne "know", but all of these I can get going in and look things up as I need them.
I'm really good with C, C++, Go and Perl.
Decent with Python, Ruby, Bourne shell, C#, Javascript
Forgotten a lot but it'll come back: Java, Scala, Visual Basic, LISP (elisp really).
Still learning: Rust, D, Haskell, F#
Once you've learned procedural, object oriented, and functional styles a particular language is just details. And build tools and libraries and debuggers and analyzers, the whole ecosystem aroun
More than 25 (Score:2)
I've been programming for 30 years professionally, it's hard to keep track of all the languages that have come and gone.
A few at various levels of know-how. (Score:2)
Programming and languages (Score:2)
This is sort of a loaded question in my opinion. Once you become proficient in any form of computer programming, then start adding languages of programming to your experience, they all sort of become different ways of doing the same thing.
Sort of just like the spoken or written words of any particular human language. Though in computers it's substantially more simple.
What I'm saying is, once you know a handful of programming languages proficiently, you pretty much can consider yourself to know all forms o
Knowing is not knowledge (Score:2)
I know all of them as it would take minutes to be able to read and hours to write.
But would I be a good programmer with it?
No way.
I program since 20+ years on C, C++ and bash, mostly daily.
Does Commodore 64 Assembly count? (Score:2)
In cronical order (Score:2)
Locomotive Basic, C64 Basic, Pascal, C, Scheme (a bit), Fortran 77, Modula 2, PHP, Java, Xtend, R, Python. In reality it is not about how many languages you learned, but how many you have already forgotten again.
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Oh I forgot assembly languages for 8085 (in school), z80 at home, 8086 at home and school, 80386 (protected mode), MIPS (tiny bits).
Languages are tools... (Score:2)
After you've used more than a couple of programming langauges, you realize that they are just tool. Different languages are better suited for different situations. But in the end, any Turing-complete language can solve any computational problem.
What makes the difference are the libraries and frameworks available, and knowing your way around those libraries. For example, if you're doing desktop development, and the whole development group uses JavaFX for the UIs, then Java and JavaFX will get used for nearly
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Oh yes, let the bragging begin.
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The standard I would use is "can solve a simple but non-trivial problem in a idiomatic form without googling the solution".
Examples might be:
In any language I claim to "know", I should be able to do those things in a straightforward manner.
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Agreed - those were examples rather than a definitive list, and I think that context matters. Backend or serverside languages don't make sense with graphical elements - I would struggle to draw to the screen in perl or bash, myself. My point is that there is a class of problems for any language which are non-trivial (more complex than HelloWorld/FizzBuzz [codinghorror.com]), but should be solvable without resorting to Google.
How do we count? (Score:2)
I've got questions about how to count here:
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Real programmers used punch cards... everybody since then is just a script kiddie.
Now get off my lawn.
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...and the smart ones use a pen to number their cards in case of misadventure with the stack before it gets into the card reader.
Though, mind you, real programmers, if you want to go back far enough, were writing machine code and peeking and poking things arounds and managing the CPUs registers, memory, interrupt handlers and that sorts of stuff the hard way (which I don't miss, much as I don't miss manually managing DMA and Interrupts on hardware). And when prototyping, sometimes you'd be burning your own