Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

The actual bash processing bits seem much slower than Perl or Python.

It has all the benefits of a modern language -- strong typing, generics, operator overloading, objects, metaclasses, dynamic arrays, interfaces, RTTI, dynamic dispatch, method pointers, type helpers, true modules, fast compile times, preprocessor directives, pretty large set of libraries from the community, etc -- and all the benefits of a compiled language -- compiles to pretty small binaries, small memory footprint at runtime, tight control over memory allocation and layout, trivial ability to shell out to assembler when necessary, etc. It builds to pretty much every platform under the sun -- Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, MSDOS, OS/2, BeOS, Netware, you name it.

Some of its features are features I've rarely seen in 'fashionable' languages. For example the way classes and metaclasses work in FreePascal is great. You can pass classes around by value, constructors can be virtual, even static methods can be virtual.

In many ways it's really a better C++. For example, what I just said about metaclasses. It has native support for strings. The declaration part of a module (unit interface) is separate from its implementation, so it's easy to get an overview of what is exported from a module, but it's in the same file and is a first-class-citizen of the language, unlike C++ header files. The syntax also makes a lot more sense than C-like languages. For example, there's an explicit keyword to introduce a function, and constructors are named rather than using the type name. (These don't sound like interesting features until you're trying to navigate the source and you find that searching for a method becomes far easier, or you're trying to copy/paste a class and you find you don't have to worry about renaming constructors, stuff like that.) It doesn't even have to link in a libc, it has its own RTL. (It can link in a libc if you want to use some C or C++ libraries with it though.)

There's aspects of it that are a bit crufty from having decades of legacy, but it's probably still better than C++ in that regard.

I don't really know why Pascal derivatives haven't taken off more.

At work I use Dart, which has many of the benefits I listed above, but in the form of a GC'ed VM-hosted language. Dart's a much newer language, though, so regardless of its usage it's probably too early to know if it will end up in the "unfashionable" category. Dart has all kinds of cool features like the ".." operator for chaining, the "??=" operator for assignment-if-null, the "with" feature for doing composition rather than inheritance, etc. Also very readable.

And as a former Tcl dabbler, that's also definitely not the first thing I'd pick on. `upvar` is a far more egregious violator of sanity, and I seem to recall that parsing optional arguments to a function is quite the adventure.

VFP had a slick little way of letting you indirectly address variables and pop them into a SQL statement or other VFP code, and they would evaluate at runtime. Later when I was learning Java & Javascript I was quite annoyed that I was not able to do this.