[dwharrison]

I first encountered SNOBOL when I was 15, running an implementation on an old IBM 360 at university. It was the 3rd language I mastered (after Fortran and an early T/S version of Basic...both on the same 360) and the first I completely fell in love with.

It awoken me to just how different and amazing a programming language could be and bent my mind around something very different than what I'd been doing with Fortran. It was an entirely new way to think about designing solutions.

Years later when I was introduced to Prolog, everything thing felt very much at home...Prolog's backtracking algorithm being very much like SNOBOL's pattern matching system.

Of all the languages I've worked with over the years, SNOBOL and FORTH are in class by themselves for how they informed my thinking about problem solving...lessons I carried with me in work done in many other languages.

It's a shame that both languages have passed into history...they each had subtle things to teach a developer just learning their craft...