Programming

Programming is my passion. It is the best life-time hobby I can imagine. It all got sparked in 1982 when I played Munchkin on a friend's Videopac G7000. This pacman clone blew me away, and I desperately wanted a 'game computer'. My father replied to my plea: `No we are not going to buy a game computer. We'll buy a real computer.' To which I replied: `What is a real computer?' The answer hit like a bomb: `With a real computer you can make your own games.' The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Here's an overview of the programming languages in my life in rough chronological order.

• It all started with ZX Spectrum Basic.
• Then Z80 machine language (Assembler came later!)
• Forth, using White Lightning from Oasis Software required a mental shift due to the RPN.
• Intel 8086 assembly.

Most of the programming languages I picked up were studied as part of my Computer Science degree at the University of Amsterdam:

• Pascal
• Motorola 68K assembly
• Microcode
• Scheme
• Sasl
• Fortran
• Prolog
• C
• Occam

And then in mostly in industry, I picked up:

• Postscript (stack based like Forth)
• C++
• Python
• Objective C

Currently, my favourites are C (I use a C++ compiler but try to use as little C++ features as possible) and Python.