As I tweeted earlier today, I suddenly realised that it’s around 40 years since I wrote my first code – as part of a maths option in high school.

The programming language was Algol68 and the code was a hello world program – something like

BEGIN
print ("Hello World!");
END.

The code was written on punched cards. I can’t remember what machine it was run on, other than it was at the local technical college, so I’m guessing it was probably something like an ICL minicomputer given the choice of language.

Stood me in good stead too – in my first year of university we did some formal bnf stuff in mathematical methods and wrote some AlgolW to validate it …

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