Does this make me multilingual? July 16, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in computers, electromagnetics, engineering, grad school, math, physics, research.Tags: computers, dissertation, fortran, languages, programming
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I began my programming education quite young and have maintained my skills over the years. I have recently been thinking of documenting some of the various languages and software programs I’ve learned to use, so here is as good a place as any.
- 4th grade – TI Basic
- 8th grade – Logo
- 10th grade – BasicA and Apple Basic (pretty close to the same thing)
- 12th grade – Fortran and QBasic (these were at the college)
In college:
- took a class on C and had to learn unix, too
- learned Maple in a calc course
- learned matlab for a research project and used it extensively in a numerical analysis course
- learned mathcad for a physics lab course
- learned mathematica for intro to differential equations and used that for many other classes
During my MS, I was exposed to half a dozen software packages for computational electromagnetics modeling (half of which are trademarked, so I’m not going to bother listing them).
In the past couple years at work, I’ve gotten pretty handy with Scilab.
After all of this, you would think that I have a pretty complete toolkit. I should be able to do pretty much whatever I need with what I’ve already learned. I find it ironic, therefore, that I am back to using Fortran (one of the first things I learned). I also have been spending the past month trying to learn IDL (which, if you don’t mind me saying, seems like a less friendly version of matlab), so there is something new, again. Also, I have people pestering me to learn python.
Looking at this list, I’m starting to think I’m learning things so that I can simply forget them again later. I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten more than I remember.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
My husband wants me to learn programming. Probably in my spare time. Ha!
If you have not forgotten much of the programming that you’ve learned/used, you must have an exceptional memory. How many versions of Fortran, alone, have you learned/used? (Some of us are so old that we learned/used the original 1957 version!)
In the olden days (my undergraduate days in the 1950s), some engineering schools actually did allow one to count (properly validated, of course) a computer programming language for one of the two foreign languages required for an MS.
You will undoubtedly learn many more languages and systems before you retire. You’ve made impressive strides, already.
[…] you saw from my list the other day, I know several languages and software packages, but I figured most of them were not going to be […]