In the bible, it states "when i grew up, i put away childish things." That is the way my programming career has gone. At first, I learned QBASIC on an old 'laptop' (that probably weighed 20lbs with no hard drive). That seemed to be the coolest thing in the whole wide world. In an attempt to expand my horizons, I learned ASIC50, which is BASIC with no line numbers (which teaches the good practice of eliminating GOTOs). Then I took computer science II at King George High School. Oooh man, Pascal was the coolest langauge ever! I'd never switch back to BASIC! I learned HTML as a side project (and still use it- obviously). It's kind of a special purpose language.
Note the new paragraph. This is where it's at. My senior year of high school came. I was selected to be in computer science III. King George High School has a deal with Synetics, a defense contracting company- select students are sent there as mentor students. I was introduced to C++. Unlike most of the C++ classes I've had since then, this was more than just C++. This was software engineering. For those of you who don't know the difference between computer programming and software engineering, I'll explain it to ya. Computer programmers are fed a specific set of instructions. Make a program that does this. Write a class that contains this. Software engineers say, 'well, let's see. How can I make this program efficient? This class will inherit this- you write that class. Talk to Bob, because he is working on the base class.' There is much more thought required when engineering software. It is the actual design of the software, including building for later expasion and code re-use. This is the fun stuff. BASIC and Pascal are for chumps.
When I hit college, I lost interest in programming for bigger and better things, though it is nice to be able to whip together a cheap Builder program to do simple tasks for me. In my Introduction to Computer Engineering course, I was forced to learn some assembly on a PIC Microcontroller, which was fun as well and will have stuff posted here too.