The question here is about unfashionable languages and no one here has commented about it yet :D php, tcl, c++, java ?? come on guys.
Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
71–80 of 338 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It gets the job done This sounds like other similar language will not get the job done. The truth is that there are much better alternatives which are a lot more pleasant to use and will get the job done in a much better way. > it's easy to use This is a myth. Php is not easy to use. May be, It is easy to start. But you need to know a lot of useless stuff (outside the context of Php), to get anything to work any whe…
To quote the classical piece on the subject ("PHP: a fractal of bad design"): There is a whole lot of action at a distance. Consider this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere. There is a whole lot of action at a distance. Consider this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere: @fopen('http://example.com/not-existing-file', 'r'); What will it do? If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won’t work. (…
Some people simply cannot accept that anyone would find PHP useful... or even tolerate its existence, and employ one particular (and increasingly obsolete) rant as if it were an objective argument against someone else's opinion on the matter. And yet, it's all subjective.
If you don't like PHP, don't use PHP. It's that simple.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Full blown ERP with postgresql. Its super fast, as it is a native windows application and thats what our customers like about it. Also with nice components like devexpress its looking realy good, has high usability and is easy to develop.
I'd love to see some screenshots of a modern Delphi application if that's possible?
Have a look here:
https://www.devexpress.com/Products/VCL/
Especialy their datagrid is the most advanced and fun thing to work with.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#74There's lots of job openings out there for COBOL coders. Nobody wants to learn it, and those who know it are dying off.
As a young developer, do you know where and how I could go about getting into the COBOL industry? All the job listings seem to require a decade's worth of experience and lists expertise requirements in technologies that are proprietary and only available on a mainframe. COBOL on its own is not very hard to pick up, but I'm lost as to how to learn about the ancillary technologies. I'm not sure it's so much that nobody…
Why would you want to?
There's a lot of smoke and noise made about how companies are desperate for COBOL developers because the old ones are retiring or dying blah blah blah, but I've never seen actual good salaries to back it up. And to add insult to injury, you're unlikely to be able to take the skills you've learned to your next job when you inevitably change jobs.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
To quote the classical piece on the subject ("PHP: a fractal of bad design"): There is a whole lot of action at a distance. Consider this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere. There is a whole lot of action at a distance. Consider this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere: @fopen('http://example.com/not-existing-file', 'r'); What will it do? If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won’t work. (…
Some people simply cannot accept that anyone would find PHP useful... or even tolerate its existence, and employ one particular (and increasingly obsolete) rant as if it were an objective argument against someone else's opinion on the matter. And yet, it's all subjective. If you don't like PHP, don't use PHP. It's that simple.
And that's precisely what I did, of course - I no longer use it.
But it doesn't mean I'm prohibited to share my experience with it.
I never denied it's "useful" (is it supposed to mean much? Obviously, if apps are written in it, apparently it is of use, by definition), however I'm not alone in thinking there are better alternatives and - again, based on my personal experience - the more exposure to other languages and technology stacks a PHP developer has had, the more critical they get about PHP.
The rant may be getting obsolete, but the mentality persists. To quote the creator of PHP himself: "I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests". And this attitude seems very common among PHP developers. It's not just about the language, it's also about the culture. And no I'm not saying other languages are surrounded with perfect cultures (like Java's "achitecture astronauts" with mammoth frameworks and overuse of design patterns).
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#76I 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…
There used to be a company called IDX which sucked in many MIT grads into the world of MUMPS. GE bought them.. do you work for GE?
Or Epic healthcare in Madison, that was my first job out of college and continues to grow at an insane rate.
MUMPS was a kinda cool language - I liked it a lot better than VB6 which the GUI was written in. Every line had to start with a command like 'set' or 'do', which was abbreviated as 's' or 'd' which looked pretty gnarly. The `for` loop syntax there was a difference between 1 or 2 spaces which after the 'f(or)' :o There was a max file size and filename and function limit of like 6 characters, so things were named pretty cryptically. It had a built in object database and basic array and hash datastructures which were neat though.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#77I used to code a lot in Fortran 77, but have been programming in Modern Fortran for the past few years (90, 95... I am not sure which standard I am adhering to exactly). Both of these would also be considered fashionable. Part of the reason is that it's still the standard in chemical engineering and atmospheric science for large-scale simulation where speed is an issue. There has been a long history of compiler optim…
Good article describing Fortran's historical dominance:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computings...
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#78There are a couple languages I write code in that are less popular, notably TCL and bash shell. Throughout the 2000's I wrote a lot of Perl, but it's now been a while. Most of my development these days is in Go, Python, or Javascript.
TCL is a language that has its problems, but has some really interesting use-cases. TCL is the LUA-before-LUA that is particularly great for constructing REPLs and DSLs. It has a forward-polish notation that can make it easy to construct a shell-like DSL or for processing other forward-polish notation languages and formats (URLs are FPN!)
I find bash shell to be the most enjoyable language that I work with. It's actually possible to write good, readable software in shell, but it's absolutely a skill that developers choose not to hone. Shell is something that many find necessarily and few developers really understand. This leads to a lot of bad software and, consequently, a culture against the language. Objectively, there are good reasons why shell might not be good for large applications, but those arguments could be made for more popular languages as well. However, due to the biases against it and the fact that many developers know "just enough to be dangerous", it's not a good language for teams.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wanted to say that I still occasionally use TCL, too! :)
I also use Tcl quite a lot for some pretty sophisticated software. (And it's not embedded! It seems most surviving Tcl programmers are using it as an embedded scripting language.)
I've written larger apps in TCL, but it was painful. I must admit to being guilty of using it solely as an embedded language these days.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#80My dad uses and has used BASIC. He's not a teacher, nor a hobbyist. He writes bank software. In BASIC. For forty years. At the same company. UBS, Bank of China, and other names all run this massive million(s)-line BASIC codebase, that he almost singlehandedly wrote, on minicomputers[1] powered by OpenVMS. With it, according to my father, they process billion dollars worth of transactions and other facets of their bus…
> perhaps better saved for a blog post
Please do write it, and submit it to HN! This is the sort of material nearly all of us would love to read.