Computer languages and personality?

[nancylebov]

Discussion of programmer preferences-- is there a correlation between cognitive style or other personality factors and what languages a programmer loves or hates?

Does starting out with COBOL actually have long-term effects?

Link thanks to andrewducker.

Comments

[krings-keep.livejournal.com]

I love DOS and cobol due to the simplicity of style. HTML and C++ seem to be 'cousins' of COBOL.

My cognitive style is more logical and precise.
I started with an Apple IIe, and wrote DOS as my first language.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Not based on my own experiences (although I believe I learned Fortran II and IV slightly before COBOL by a matter of some weeks). Since then coded for money in PL/I, PROTOS, Jyacc JAM, A triad of 'languages' that began with Q, SQL, C. Java, and PHP at least.

[madfilkentist]

While I realize there are uses for which COBOL is excellent, it strikes me as simultaneously dumbed down and logically messy. I like Lisp and its relative Muddle (best known as the language Zork was first written in), and when object-oriented programming came out, I took to it as the way programming always should have been. These days I write most of my code in Java, which I like in its core language but don't care much for in the ways it's been bloated over the years.

There might be a connection between Myers-Briggs types and programming language preferences. I've never taken a formal test, but on the informal ones I come out INTJ or ISTJ.