Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Programming languages are relevant but not critical to software engineers, but recruiters at job fairs love this question. For the record, I list my languages.

I have been going to job fairs recently trying to find a job. People claim they are looking for systems engineers, software engineers, and software systems engineers. The first question they ask, however, is:

What programming languages do you know?

I try to understand. They are recruiters. They are given a list of questions to ask. They really don’t understand the words they are using. I smile. I try not to lecture them on the field of endeavor. There are two little statements that summarize the field:

Software engineers analyze requirements and design software that will meet requirements.

Programmers write programs.

I guess I am stupid or something, because I don’t understand how recruiters don’t understand this.

But for the record, here are, to the best of my recollection, the languages I have used to write working software:

1. Z-80 assembly language (in hex a octal)
2. 8080 assembly language
3. 8086 assembly language
4. IBM 360 assembly language
5. IBM Job Control Language
6. PL/C
7. PL/I
8. Pascal
9. LISP
10. Prolog
11. C
12. C++
13. C#
14. Objective C
15. Java
16. Perl
17. TCL
18. MS Basic
19. Basic
20. FORTRAN – at least half a dozen versions
21. Python
22. JavaScript
23. Ada
24. DOS .bat files
25. Unix C-Shell
26. Bourne Shell
27. Bourne Again Shell
28. Algol
29. APL
30. AHPL
31. TeX
32. LaTeX
33. HTML
34. DocBook

I hope this list will convince recruiters that I understand programming and programming languages and that is there is a language that I need to understand, I will be able to understand it quickly.