"I Win" Button

[absimiliard]

*hangs head in shame*

COBOL. Never did much with it, thank the Ghodz.

-abs

[Cory Trese]

There is no shame in COBOL. People still make mad bucks with it.

I'm sure your second language carries less stigma. I went form ANSI-C to QBASIC lol.

*hangs head in shame*

(PS: I used QBASIC to make an epic adventure game with Andrew. It was awesome and it never worked. After that I started learning C++ and I still have the book I learned from.)

[absimiliard]

Ouch.

I forget if I went fortran or pascal next, I think it was pascal. In either case I never really bothered mastering them. The next language I actually learned was C++.

These days I've pretty much forgotten them all. Sysads mostly just script in the linux world, and mostly just point-and-click in the windows/mac worlds, *sigh @windows*.

-abs

[slayernz]

Heh ... my job entails me coming up with grandiose visions of how I want the product to look/function/feel ... and then get those with coding smarts to actually convert my vision into reality. It means I don't have to write any code (which is good cos the only languages I even remotely know is HTML and SQL, and neither are "real" coding languages).

[Fenikso]

Aug 31, 2011 8:12:34 GMT -5 Tenebrous Pirate said:

So, what is your first language?

My first language is Czech. You can tell because of the most common mistakes:
• Forgetting articles -- as we do not have them at all
• Too many commas -- as we have another rules for the use
• Bad use of past-like tenses -- as we have just future, present, past

I think those mistakes in English are common for all similar first languages, such as Polish, Slovak, Russian... I am curious if your wife would be able to tell just from my writing.

When it comes to programming languages, I have started with Basic on Atari 800XL. Great memories :
10 PRINT "Hello World!"
20 GOTO 10

[Tenebrous Pirate]

Ahhh, I come from mostly Czech and German heritage. I don't speak any Czech though, but I my cousin visited Prague last year.

My wife, well, she has a gift for linguistics. I have a bit of one too, but I never use it. She speaks a little bit of most of the major languages out there, and can easily recognize differences in dialects.

One time, she receieved an email when selling stuff on craigslist, where she told me she knew the guy had to be Persian. She asked him in her reply, and sure enough, Farsi was his first language. I can remember her doing similar with a writer from Peru, and a chick from Russia.

Basically, she is very good at recognizing sentence structure patterns and common language translation mistakes. She generally can tell what they are trying to say, and her mind just tells her what language they were trying to say it in. Anywho, that got off topic!