I was on Skype with a colleague today working on a Risk Management Plan, when the conversation turned to how many programming languages have you worked in?
This was a diversion while waiting for uploads of 32MB files!!
Here's my list and the applications:
- Forth - handheld UHF radio control operating system.
- MACRO-11 and MACRO-8 and MACRO-10 - for the PDP-11, PDP-8, and PDP-10. If you couldn't knock out a Fast Fourier Transform using the Cooley-Tukey algorithm in under a week, you were not allowed to continue working on our team. Also if you couldn't toggle in the PDP-11 bootloader (in HEX) from the front panel from memory - no cheating and looking at the paper, you were a certified wimp when it came to real-time programming.
- SNOBOL - parsing of text streams containing telemetry for remotely controlled aircraft
- AutoLISP - AutoCAD programming for piping design systems.
- A piping design system language - LISP Like - whose name I can't remember for the Evans and Sutherland Picture System. Two of the engineers from E&S in mountain view went on to start Adobe. I didn't want to move north and had no desire to work outside very large companies - Fluor Engineers and Constructors at the time.
- APL - Kalman filters for submarine detection and tracking and submarine rudder probabilistic control loop.
- YACC - translator for micro-code stack language to FORTRAN 77
- RATFOR - structure FORTRAN 77 for radar signal interface through a PDP-11/20 on the NC-135 RINT platform building signal recognition code for the SAM-6. This is the domain where you program the machine in the middle of Ohio in the winter, with gloves and a USAF issued flight jacket and slept on the floor of the aircraft because there are no hotels and the hanger is not heated.
- JOVIAL - Algol language for the AN/UYK-7 that was emulated on an AMD-2901 bit slice machine in its own microcode language.
- SmallTalk - shop floor router generation on a Xerox Star desktop computer.
- DIBOL - report writing off a radar signal processor
- FOCAL - signal processing language on a PDP-15/20
- PASCAL - first hardware implemented micro instruction CPU chip built by Western Digital in Irvine and embedded control systems.
Never did learn C, C++, or JAVA. This was the end of my software engineering career when I started complaining that the development managers were doing a crap job of managing the program. My boss said, OK, now you get to do that.
The company sent us to USC to get a Masters Degree in Systems Management (a combination of Systems Engineering and Managerial Finance) and the rest is history.
