VB6.
You can literally feel the disdain from others when I talk about it.
Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
291–300 of 338 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's true with Perl at least, unless something has changed dramatically very recently.
If you use it to glue/pipe bunch of tools written in C it can easily be faster.
Which often is what you do in Bash with grep, cp, mv, find etc...
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is pretty awesome, and the speed is great. I really like obscure search engines, because their (comparatively :P) tiny indexes mean they'll return significantly different data to what say Google or Bing would return. If there's one thing I would definitely vote for with projects like this, it would be... an API. In a world where virtually every search engine is built around the idea of controlled, non-open acces…
Non-ASCII characters are indeed messed up. I wrote the HTML parser about 15 years ago. Back then my programming style was so bad, that I'm afraid nothing short of a complete rewrite of the parser will be able to fix it. The Archive.org crawl is way too old to be of any use. And the Common Crawl corpus is only marginally bigger than what I crawl myself. There are currently just over a billion pages in my search-index…
The WHATWG had a spec-compliant HTML parser in Pascal, if you need it. Currently only does UTF-8 but that should be fixable.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#294Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#295VBA in excel.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#296I use Awk fairly regularly, in the form of actual scripts (not just expressions passed on the command line). Despite its age, it's still extremely powerful and usually very pleasant to read and write. Gawk adds socket support, so writing network scripts is usually painless. I've also been known to write Perl (5) and Tcl programs, but significantly less often nowadays.
Add me to the list of people that use Awk. It's my goto language for programs of less than 100 lines. I can do a lot in 100 lines.
I've only used GAWK's network support a few times, mostly to write data collection on a set of boxes and then ship them to a central box for data presentation.
For text data processing it's really hard to beat AWK.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is the best OO language there is, it is after all the original OO language. Everything else is a poor copy.
Depends on one's perspective. You could also make an argument that Simula was the first. I'll grant you that Kay coined the term (at least AFAIK)
Simula was not an object oriented language, it was a procedural language with objects; that's a very different thing. Smalltalk took objects and made them primary, everything, even the language itself is built upon the foundation of objects. True and False for example are not language elements, they are singleton instances of the classes True and False which are both subclasses of Boolean. What are "if" statements in other languages, including Simula (a superset of AGOL) are virtual methods in Smalltalk in the Boolean hierarchy.
Simula invented objects and added them as an option to a procedural language; Smalltalk took them and built a language out of them and thus coined the term Object Oriented.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#298I maintain a code base at a multinational bank written in Brainfuck. Just kidding.
Do you use the video gestural interpreter input option https://vimeo.com/7133810 ? It really helps keep you in good shape. Kind of a "Code Code Revolution!"
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#299I use a language originally called MUMPS, with the alternate name of M, which is the core language in Cache Object Script. I use it because it has features that are still not (really) included in more "modern" languages, because it is actively used in niche markets, and because I've used it for 34 years, so I have a lot of experience in it and tools written in it. It is incredibly terse, which allows for use in tight…
Ha good old Cache. I did that for four years out of college. My friends and I couldn't stand the language and couldn't wait to leave it. I realized later that it was ahead of the curve on nosql, but I never heard if InterSystems managed to ride the wave or mostly hangs on with existing business.
Is this Cache the same Cache object database that used to be advertised in mags like DDJ and CUJ?
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#300I get the feeling that Perl qualifies as "unfashionable". To be fair, I haven't stepped up to Perl 6 just yet, so I arrive at that conclusion from a Perl 5 perspective.
Why do I still use it? That's broken into two parts. I started using it because it was the language of choice for web apps circa 1999. I kept using it until recent years because of a large code base I was maintaining.
I continue to use it today because Perl Dancer 2 is a kick-ass framework. It has an extendable DSL, and it really makes short work out of writing web apps.