The Languages That Passed Through

COBOL, FORTRAN, FoxPro, Delphi — languages I studied and forgot, while the ones I lean on now I never quite learned.

A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.

Java became a force in the late 1990s, HTML had only just appeared, and in the short window before Python, JavaScript, and Go came along, a surprising number of languages drifted past me. There was a course called Introduction to Programming Languages, and between that and a string of odd jobs, all sorts of them came and went — more, looking back, than I’d have guessed.

COBOL / FORTRAN

Even in class these were handled the way you’d handle a history book — the old languages, the ones people had been using since the beginning. There were exams and assignments, and some hazy memory of running things on a machine somewhere, and though I’m sure the professors and teaching assistants taught them well, what stayed with me was mostly the outcome — which I’ll put down to being a busy undergraduate who learned by homework and lab and not much else.

The word was that you needed COBOL to get hired in banking, that come the year 2000 the Y2K bugs would surface in droves, and that this was where you were supposed to pick up the habit of lining your code up neatly. FORTRAN arrived with the explanation that it was widely used in scientific computing, and I spent my time there building something like a calculator, grumbling the whole way about why, exactly, I had to use this particular thing.

FoxPro / Visual Basic

Tagging along with seniors on small software gigs, these were the tools we leaned on. Money was tight, but we did buy the licenses, and I was already out in the field putting things together — tables, something that amounted to a message board — before I’d properly learned anything about databases at all. I’m not sure how we’d have managed without them.

Visual Basic, when Microsoft released it, I took to with real enthusiasm, whether or not it counts as a serious programming language. Against the clunkiness of MFC on Windows, you could poke around with Document and View, and there was the old comfort of Basic underneath; if you weren’t going to lay the whole thing out on one screen anyway, having that little block — macro or function — tell you then and there when something was wrong was its own kind of relief. Building alone, I was a long way from anything you’d call testing or readability.

Pascal / Delphi / Scripts

Whether we touched Pascal in class I genuinely can’t recall, but Delphi I used for a good long while after graduating, and I remember Pascal mostly as a part of Delphi rather than as itself. On one hand it wasn’t so far from C, C++, or Java, and I figured I’d be fine as long as I kept an eye on the arrays; on the other, pulling in Windows modules and snapping them together opened up a small new world. It overlapped with my early working life, and maybe for that reason the memories aren’t especially fond ones.

The things I was paid to build back then leaned toward screen layout and printing — membership management for a video rental store, that sort of thing — much of which you could do in Excel, and I was already writing scripts that live on now as spreadsheet cell operations. I gave plenty of pages, too, to a licensed copy of Hangul, Korea’s homegrown word processor. You could argue about whether Basic-style commands count as a programming language at all, but what I actually remember, looking back, is less the languages than whether a given thing could be gotten through with enough patience.

P.S. It started with HTML and CSS, and somewhere along the way I was writing JavaScript; I couldn’t tell you when or how I learned Python, but there I was, using it. Shell and PHP I picked up as they came at me, and regular expressions I somehow just speak now. The ones I actually sat down and studied were Basic, C, Java — so this, I suppose, is what time quietly does. Lately I’ve been turning the newer ones over too, Go and Rust, and as for what I’ll have to learn next, I find myself somewhere between hopeful and worried in this GPT world of ours.

Part of 90s Computer Science Stories — first-person notes on growing up with computers and studying CS in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/55