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

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

#301

Post by dawnbreez »

josegonzalez wrote: post #178
dawnbreez wrote: post #69

Bash users represent! Seriously, Bash is fucking beautiful once you really dig into it. Pipes are unbelievably elegant.

Bash is great - we write almost 100% of dokku in it - but most bash looks like shit on a stick. Really hard to follow sometimes, and unless you are using modern bash, also really hard to ensure your own sanity.

I suspect that part of it is unusual syntax--if...fi, anyone?--and part of it is unusual syntax in non-bash things, i.e., Awk looks like moon runes, and to replace ; with \; in sed you need a grand total of SIX backslashes.

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

#302

Post by dawnbreez »

MCRed wrote: post #216
dawnbreez wrote: post #69

Bash users represent! Seriously, Bash is fucking beautiful once you really dig into it. Pipes are unbelievably elegant.

Elixir has pipes too. One of the great things about it.

I'll have to check it out, then.

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

#304

Post by jpindar »

hnur wrote: post #38

I use C as my staple language. Old and always unfashionable, but it's never going away in my lifetime.

Unfashionable? Maybe in the sense that tshirts and jeans are unfashionable, but are worn daily by most of the people who make our technological civilization possible.

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

#305

Post by shoover »

vram22 wrote: post #299
shoover wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's the one. The database is like kind of like a giant arbitrarily deep hash table of strings and numbers. At some point they added objects to the programming language and made a way load and save them to the database. Voila, object database.

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

#307

Post by i336_ »

deusu wrote: post #287
i336_ wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah. 2001 was... the era of HTML4, more or less, so it's still seeing the majority of page content, but... no Unicode. I see. I figured old data was uninteresting, but TIL that crawling data yourself is not impossible. I mean you have to come from a thousand IPs, browser UAs and cookie states to find everything thanks to the sad state of things, but wow, I didn't realize 200Mbps could do so much. :D As for the errors…

Crawler works from a single IP. User-Agent is fixed to the robot's UA. Cookies are totally ignored. The search-engine works with just 2 servers. Crawler/Indexer and Webserver/queries. Crawler is a root-server with 1gbit/s connection hosted in a datacenter. Webserver sits here at home with 200mbit downstream and 20mbit upstream. I use the Alexa top-1-million sites as seed-list for the crawler. The errors that do appea…

1Gbps for the crawler totally explains it: I can see that doing 600 URL/sec. xD

I didn't think of CloudFlare being able to see the traffic... and wow, I never even processed that aspect of their service. But of course...

How good is Google's "[ ] I'm not a robot" checkbox thingy at weeding out bots? And perhaps you could use multiple captcha systems...? (Or are actual people tasked to do signups?!)

I shudder to think of such an idea, but linking API keys to may be an alternative. (One thing that comes to mind is that, if someone authenticates using Reddit - which they can do without releasing any account info - is that you could check their (public, but unfakeable) karma counts and use that as a measure of confidence, in addition to the standard account age metric used everywhere.)

The new design is nice :D

And if it's been a year (!), another Show HN sometime would certainly be fine.

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

#308

Post by prawn »

harel wrote: post #200
prawn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use almost entirely ColdFusion (well, Railo). Never studied computer science so don't know any better. Wouldn't know what to transition to if I wanted to use anything else.

Try Python. Its nothing like CFML but it has that "AHA" feel to it that reminded me of the same AHA ColdFusion gave me in the nineties.

Thanks. I'll investigate. I have used ColdFusion for 10+ years and as such am comfortable enough in it, and support 50-100 sites built with it. But sometimes it's hard to find tools/tips out there as the community isn't very strong.

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

#309

Post by prawn »

bdcravens wrote: post #252
prawn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use almost entirely ColdFusion (well, Railo). Never studied computer science so don't know any better. Wouldn't know what to transition to if I wanted to use anything else.

What kind of apps do you build? Framework-driven? If you use fw/1, look at Sinatra (Ruby) or Express (Node.js); ColdBox, look at Rails. You may wish to look at CF on Wheels - it may be a good on-ramp to Rails.

CMS/CRM-type things. No frameworks.

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

#310

Post by leshow »

Klathmon wrote: post #46

We use a business-basic style language called ProvideX[1] from the mid 80s. 99% of our codebase is GOTOs, GOSUBs, and PERFORMs. It's a mess to deal with. But at the same time, the language has a database layer built in that (while slow) works well enough for our uses, it has a GUI toolkit that works cross platform, and you can run the same GUI panel via a web browser through a shim that the company created. That's th…

> I can make a program and GUI, and have it run on windows, linux, osx, and the web without any changes.

you should check out electron https://github.com/atom/electron

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