Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#21

Post by Multicomp » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

jweather wrote: post #19

.NET Compact Framework 3.5. Might not sound that old, but it's only supported in Visual Studio 2008. Microsoft keeps trying to kill it off, but the manufacturer I support is still shipping products using it.

I work at a downstream customer of some company like yours. They like their windows mobile 6.5 devices very nicely, thank you very much. so when 2005 rugged wall-mounted tablet-with-barcode scanner or more commonly an RFID inventory scan gun dies, they just order another one, use MDM like Avalanche to give it its network policies and programs, and next shift grabs it and are off to the races.

Using a rugged android phone is talked about and sat on, that's about it.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#22

Post by MH15 » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #9

mbfg wrote: post #6

Aren't almost all of them old at this point? The numbers of people using what most people would count as new is pretty small percentage wise.

Even the newer ones aren't that new - Rust, Go, Kotlin, Julia are over 10 years old at this point. TypeScript is 8.

What's the newest -real- language do we think? Not just "gained popularity recently" but actually newer.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#23

Post by mbfg » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

MH15 wrote: post #22

jstx1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the newer ones aren't that new - Rust, Go, Kotlin, Julia are over 10 years old at this point. TypeScript is 8.

What's the newest -real- language do we think? Not just "gained popularity recently" but actually newer.

Swift might be the most important of the newest languages. Of course there's a new language every day, but swift has a significant user base and is still under 10.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#24

Post by mattmanser » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #17

Maybe I'll come off as a youngin' with this one, but PHP. I honestly really enjoy it. There are some quirks and syntax I don't particularly like, but overall, using PHP in a server setting isn't bad at all. I always heard people talk down on it in college, but those people probably never used it either. PHP by day and Rust by night is a nice combo honestly. Pretty different, but it gives some variety.

It used to be a really dodgy language, but I heard it's improved a lot. I've only ever fixed other people's PHP code or written small plugins for wordpress, so I can't give a good opinion, but a few people have told me I should give laravel a go over the years.

One of the common complaints was that a lot of the core library had inconsistent function signatures[1], did they ever fix that? Always seemed to me that it would be an unfixable problem.

[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3254...

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#25

Post by the_only_law » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #17

Maybe I'll come off as a youngin' with this one, but PHP. I honestly really enjoy it. There are some quirks and syntax I don't particularly like, but overall, using PHP in a server setting isn't bad at all. I always heard people talk down on it in college, but those people probably never used it either. PHP by day and Rust by night is a nice combo honestly. Pretty different, but it gives some variety.

I’ve written PHP in the past. Frankly I don’t hate it much more than any other programming language that sees industrial use.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#26

Post by dyingkneepad » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

C and Bash. I absolutely love and and hope to be able to continue using them long-term. Performance is key to what we do. Sometimes we even need to look at the code generated by the compiler, so some assembly knowledge is required too.

(although sometimes I prefer C++, and learning Rust is still on my TODO list)

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#27

Post by Jtsummers » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

MH15 wrote: post #22

jstx1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the newer ones aren't that new - Rust, Go, Kotlin, Julia are over 10 years old at this point. TypeScript is 8.

What's the newest -real- language do we think? Not just "gained popularity recently" but actually newer.

This depends on how we define a language.

Ada 2012, for instance, is a significant update to Ada proper (better integrated support for design by contract, among other things). The next iteration (and its SPARK subset) is potentially closing some of the gap between Ada and Rust in the areas where Rust is presently "safer" (by some measure, here primarily memory safety) than Ada.

C++20 versus C++98 (what I initially learned) is a very different language (or has the potential to be) thanks to its greatly expanded support for certain modes of programming that C++98 did not offer. But its differences with C++17 are a lot smaller, so they're more obviously "the same" language.