I started computing in 1970 on an ICL KDF9 mainframe with punched-tape input, programming in ALGOL-60. I didn't get any formal training, but as a research student in Chemistry I had to get along as best I could. Things proceeded very slowly in those days of paper tape, punched cards and batch queues overnight. If you were very dedicated you could get two runs into the batch queue, one at 5 p.m. and one at around 2 a.m. At that rate, you could find and fix two syntax errors per night! (Of course, the trick was not to make any syntax errors in the first place, but an untrained programmer, learning on the job, simply has to make mistakes).
I enjoyed ALGOL very much - it was an elegant, legible, sensible third-generation language which wasn't too hard to get to grips with. Pretty soon I got access to a teletype terminal to the mainframe which meant I could run programs more frequently, and so make better progress. I flirted with FORTRAN for a while in the 70s, without much enthusiasm, then, after graduating, abandoned computing for high school chemistry teaching for some years.
In 1981 I met my first desktop microcomputer - a Commodore PET with a 40x25 text display - and first encountered BASIC. It was a considerable disappointment after ALGOL, but it was effective for small programs and I soon began writing yards of spaghetti and storing it on miles of cassette tape at 300 baud. I also first encountered machine code, in the form of the PET memory monitor, by means of which one could modify memory locations directly, always supposing one had the courage! But all the time I wondered why I couldn't have something more like ALGOL, or perhaps Pascal? It appeared, following the introduction of floppy disc drives, in the form of CBM COMAL, but it was a disappointment because its error messages were delivered from the diskette, and so you had to wait quite a while before you found out exactly what piece of nonsense you had just typed in. During the PET years, I taught BASIC but always tried to point out how dangerous spaghetti was to the beginner.
Then, in 1984/85 the Christensen brothers produced their 16K masterpiece - Acorn COMAL, available for the Acorn BBC 'B' and, later, BBC Master series micros. To squeeze a case-insensitive, syntax-checking, fully-non-spaghetti-structured COMAL interpreter into 16K of 6502 code was a tour de force, even if it did mean leaving out error-trapping. By this time I was teaching computing full-time, and we were slowly re-equipping with Acorn machines, so we moved from BASIC to Acorn COMAL as quickly as we could.
In the late 1980s, adult students began to appear in schools to attend catch-up work-oriented courses, with computing a common choice. By then, IBM PCs had begun to penetrate the business world in numbers, which meant that teaching adults with Acorn micros was not as helpful to them as it might be. So we bought some PCs, and started thinking about programming languages. The shock on finding out how abominable GW-BASIC was, was considerable - I still haven't ever written a program in it. By a chance meeting with a visiting group of Danish teachers, I found out about UniCOMAL made contact with UniCOMAL A/S and placed an order for the current version, which was Ver2.10.
UniCOMAL provided some bonuses - full, structured error-trapping, the possibility of a compiler, bigger program space (not that that matters a lot in high school programming) and interactive, on-the-fly, syntax checking (which matters greatly with 13-year-olds). Before long I had become UniCOMAL A/S' distributor in Scotland, and had started MacharSoft. Because UniCOMAL Developers' was expensive for individual pupils, we developed a cut-down version called UniCOMAL Students', and have been dealing in both these versions ever since.
In 1994, UniCOMAL A/S was absorbed by Prolog Development Center A/S, and all development work ceased. Version 3.11 Developers was and remains the last version of UniCOMAL. It's a pity, but you can't make money writing program languages. Undaunted, however, MacharSoft are working on Visual COMAL .......