Languages

High-level languages
Language Used Comfort Notes
Java 2001-now Five stars Most of my work with Java has been in conjunction with JSPs, mid-layer work, and entity modeling. I have had some exposure to desktop UI work with Swing and SWT, but it’s been a while.
C/C++ 1991-2001 Three stars Haven’t used C++ in several years, but it was my language of choice for quite some time. I can still read it, but my desire to write it dissipates as I see things like pointer arithmetic and memcpy calls.
Pascal 1988-1995 Three stars This was the language I was raised on, but it’s not very relevant anymore. I did use some object oriented Pascal with MacApp while at Apple, but haven’t touched it since then.
Interpreted Languages
Language Used Comfort Notes
PHP 2003-now Five stars PHP is my non-enterprise web language of choice. It’s a great language to get dynamic web sites up fast, thanks to it’s easy syntax and support for just about every interface needed for a web application. I start turning to Java for highly transactional systems, or those needing high security.
Perl 2001-2009 Four stars Used mostly for file manipulation and parsing and for automating server maintenance tasks. Outside of that, most of my exposure to Perl has come from maintaining and extending Bugzilla. I currently do not have any active projects that require Perl.
Web-based languages
Language Used Comfort Notes
HTML 1995-now Five stars Very comfortable with HTML; recent focus has been on XHTML and strict standards compliance
CSS 1999-now Five stars While starting with CSS as I was transitioning into web development in ‘99, I have become a heavy user of it in the last few years as a result of some web 2.0 development. I have a strict policy for separation of HTML and styles.
Scripting languages
Language Used Comfort Notes
JavaScript 1995-now Five stars I used JavaScript a bit in the early web days, and was interested how it could create dynamic pages prior to the availability of languages like PHP. After that, however, I became frustrated with how JavaScript compatibility issues arose between browsers (and even different versions of the same browser), and started moving away. But since the emergence of Web 2.0, and standarization efforts amongst the browsers, I’ve been using JavaScript extensively with AJAX and jQuery
SQL 1998-now Four stars Did use for a while in college, but never used it professionally until the late 90’s. Have used several variations (mostly MySQL and PL/SQL) heavily in the web era.
Shell Scripting 2000-now Four stars Another ‘language’ used during college, but didn’t find a professional need until I became involved in web work and associated server maintenance. I am most comfortable with the bash shell, and have done a bit of Windows batch file work.

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