Welcome to the programming trivia community! This will be a spot where you can post questions related to the instance and others will have a chance to guess answers

Answers should be given in the comments around a day after the question was posted and do not look up answers on search engines if you are answering it. Just post a guess for what you think the answer is in the comments

Ill be doing daily questions (and will do some more today + tomorrow to start the community off) but feel free to post your own as well

To start off heres a history-related question, enjoy!

  • Paradox42@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Does Assembly count? From my understanding, it was the first many early computer manufacturers/universities, did when a new computer was developed, so they could reason about the instructions more easily on paper, before entering the code via punch cards.

  • Ategon@programming.devOPMEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago
    Click to reveal answer

    And the answer is FORTRAN. The question was a bit vague but fortran was the first commercially available language (being commercially released in 1957) and was extremely prevalent in the 1960s for science and engineering. COBOL was close but not as popular as FORTRAN (plus released later) and BASIC was mainly used in education settings with not getting more popularity until much later

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Widely used is pretty vague.

    So I’ll say BASIC. It was the first language taught in my high school, which seems to imply “wide” use

    • BenLloydPearson@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’m completely biased because this is what I started on, but Texas Instruments calculators used BASIC for decades, long after it was no longer relevant anywhere else. For a product that ancient to use the language, it must have been popular.

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yup!

        Back in the eighties, TI made a pocket computer with a qwerty keyboard and these weird shaped memory cartridges. BASIC was the default language for them, though you could get a cartridge that allowed Pascal instead.

        I got one after I did a summer course at a local college between freshman and sophomore years. It was kinda useless for anything much because the screen was a single line lol. But I set up a little rng program on it for d&d where I could press a given key and it would roll preset dice combos. Expensive toy, basically (pun intended)