This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Vee Satayamas
No one actually cares about my programming environment journey, but I’ve often been asked to share it, perhaps for the sake of social media algorithms. I post it here, so later, I can copy and paste this conveniently.
My first computer, in the sense that I, not someone else, made the decision to buy it, ran Debian in 2002. It was a used Compaq desktop with a Pentium II processor, which I bought from Zeer Rangsit, a used computer market that may be the most famous in Thailand these days. When I got it home, I installed Debian right away. Before I bought my computer, I had used MBasic, mainly MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 (though rarely), and Solaris (remotely). For experimentation, I used Xenix, AIX, and one on DEC PDP-11 that I forgot.
Since I started with MBasic, that was my first programming environment. I learned Logo at a summer camp, so that became my second. Later, my father bought me a copy of Turbo Basic, and at school, I switched to Turbo Pascal.
After moving to GNU/Linux, I used more editors instead IDEs. From 1995 to 2010, my editors were pico, nvi, vim, TextMate, and Emacs paired with GCC (mostly C, not C++), PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and SQL. I also used VisualAge to learn Java in the 90s. I tried Haskell, OCaml, Objective C, Lua, Julia, and Scala too, but it was strictly for learning only.
After 2010, I used IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse for Java and Kotlin. For Rust (instead of C), I used Emacs and Visual Studio Code. I explored Racket for learning purposes, then later started coding seriously in Clojure and Common Lisp. I tried using Vim 9.x and Neovim too, they were great, but not quite my cup of tea.
In 2025, a few days ago, I learned Smalltalk with Pharo to deepen my understanding of OOP and exploratory programming.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Vee Satayamas