Note: This is a part III of a story of a young man who tried to learn all the languages he thought he might be needed so that he could communicate more effectively both with fellow people and inanimate surroundings.

FORTRAN and APL are the first computer languages I learned to solve mathematical problems in 1984. I think I used those almost for two years for the various projects for school work and job-required projects.

BASIC is not necessarily the basic of the computer languages as the name implies. I grabbed the syntax but seldome used it.

I used Pascal to program graphics for the personal projects. Geometrical objects from my Differential Geometry and Topology classes reappeared in computer screen after weeks of debugging pascal codes. As it was personal project, I had to do it over the weekend taking up most of my personal time. Looking back, I should have dated more girls than debugging Pascal codes. Most regretably, those Pascal codes are no use at all these days :-(

LISP and Scheme are the languages of Artificial Intelligence, so I spent quite amount of time coding in it since 1985. That shaped my understanding of computer languages and most of my serious computing experiences was achieved with LISP syntax. When I started to learn LISP, now I found out that I was at the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a better place to learn at that time, and I should have not hesitated to go for a better place. Realizing how much of my efforts were wasted, I still look back those days in anger and hatred. It took me several years to get back to the right track.

Matlab is a very handy tool for comuting matrices and plotting mathematical equations into graphics forms. Since 1986, it's one of my favorite application and I recommend to all scientists and engineers for the computing. I seldom do scientific computation for the past couple of years, but still keep Matlab running in my PC.

Gauss is another scientific and engineering application script language I used occasionally in 1987, and I don't know it's still available.

UNIX Shell scripting provided me the basics of UNIX programming. Reading thick manuals was painful at that time, but UNIX C shell became an indispensible tool for my computing since then.

When I was first exposed to C in 1987, C was not as popular as it is today. I didn't do serious programming in C until I learned Assembler language and after 1992. Many of my colleagues has an extensive experiences in C, but as for me, it is split among C, LISP and UNIX.

Learning Lego, Snobol, Forth and Prolog was to get a taste of programming languages and no serious programming was done. Being a non-computer science major, I could not register reguarly for the class, and the mentioned projects were done while I was in the class. After that I was forced to drop the class as I was a mathematics major. How xxxxing they were!

Assember language for Motorolla 68000 was the first computer class I took formally in the spring of 1991 and I became serious in C language and UNIX environments. Introduction to gdb changed my outlook on programming tools. I took programming as a serious profession.

Having heard that Maple V has better features than Matlab in 1993, I used it for a while but switched back to Matlab. Mathematica is also a very useful scientific programming tool and language, but no serious use of Mathematica and Maple V as I was addicted to Matlab.

I used HTML as many people on Berkeley campus asked me about it since 1993 to make homepages, and became a serious user after the fall of 1995.

After the summer of 1995, I needed something new to get away from the boredom and tried to learn Java which was in alpha stage at that time. I'm picking up more these days with Java, but not a serious Java programmer yet. I won't be unless I'm required to. By the way, will it survive?

VRML is a portable graphics description language for the internet. I learned VRML during the spring of 1996, then gave up using it for a year, but started to program in it again as the modem speed gets faster. I see it more in the future and concentrate on developing it.

Perl is a very important CGI script language. Although I don't like it much, I use it as job requires it and it pays a lot for the network programming tool.

Tcl/Tk is another scripting language for the UNIX environments, and I enjoy building GUI for the X-Windows and wish to have more time to work with it.

So far I've listed various languages I tried to learn, but there's more I want to mention: mathematics as the language of sciences, and paintings as the language of perception translated into the visual images. More to come later.

Although I now remember a very small fraction of the languages I described above, it was definitely worth trying it. (Mar-19-97)