CESIL and other programming languages

Summary

January 29, 2026 I struggle at languages. I was taught French in school. Hated it. When I lived in Germany for a while I learnt enough to get around.German I enjoyed. I always thought Esperanto was a cool idea but never tried it. My wife is from Wales and Welsh is known to be particularly hard language to learn, or in my case even pronounce. I came to the conclusion I’m pretty useless at learning different languages plus I don’t have a great need to. Obviously I don’t expect everyone speak English wherever I go in the world - even though they often do, and better than I in many respects. Consequently I decided a while back to not even try, although I did try learning some Welsh; I failed badly. Computer languages on the other hand I have never given me any trouble. Give me a new language to learn; I’ll pick it up fast, become good at it quickly and if I keep it up proficient and after 1-2 years know almost everything there is to know about it. Some languages I get to that level, others I learn to try something out or just enough to solve a problem or help a friend. I have learnt many languages during my years practicing my trade and every now and again I try to write them all down in some kind of order. Then I lose the list. This is the start of a new list. I’ll go through all those I have been exposed to or coded in in as best a chronological order that I can recall. 1. CESIL # Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language. This is the very first language I learnt around the age of 13. It was designed for British Schools and is an assembly level language with 14 instructions. The very first program I wrote — ever — sorted three numbers. Looking back I think this was an excellent way to learn programming. Learning at a level that is quite close to how the CPU operates provides a good understanding of exactly what the computer is doing for you and how. Learning to program in a higher level language such as Lisp, Python or Javascript does not. It builds a good fo...