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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?

#21

Post by dwc »

On a daily basis I work with C and a handful of modern languages. I do reach for Common Lisp and Prolog sometimes, so I'll count those.

Common Lisp: many, many great things about lisp have been incorporated into modern languages, but CL still has a few unique things, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It's less compelling than it was 10 years ago but some problems are expressed more wonderfully in CL than in other languages.

Prolog: when prolog is the right tool then you really can't beat it. You can substitute another logic language if you like, but I'm not aware of major borrowing by modern languages (the odd library doesn't really count).

Things I'm meaning to look into but haven't really used yet:

Forth: I poke at forth every couple of years but always leave off to go do something else. I'm pretty sure I don't want to embrace the whole forth philosophy thing (real forth people are, uh, different), and doing a deep dive to see what I can take with me is something I just haven't made time for.

Snobol: I'm not really interested in Snobol wholesale at this point, but I want to explore how PEGs are used. There are PEG libraries available for other languages and I'd like to see how much benefit there is to be had from working in a modern language with a PEG library.

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

#22

Post by thrownear »

ams6110 wrote: post #7

Most of my web programming these days is in PHP. It gets the job done, it's easy to use and deploy, and I don't need anything more for the scale and complexity of what I'm doing. It's been around for a long time and doesn't seem to have a risk of going away anytime soon. SQL databases. All of the above applies. Stored procedures when the database supports them. I do not use an ORM. I try to use command-line utilites…

>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 where near reliably. Also, be prepared to write a lot more automated tests if you want to keep it that way.

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

#23

Post by 0XAFFE »

ketzu wrote: post #16
0XAFFE wrote: post #13

Delphi Developer here. Still using it at work and there is still Development in it.

Delphi was the first language I learned and I always thought it was a teaching language. What are you developing in delphi?

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.

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

#25

Post by nilkn »

kkovacs wrote: post #6
KasianFranks wrote: post #4

I use Tcl for AI in Life Sciences and Hedge Funds.

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.)

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

#27

Post by codewritinfool »

tdimaline wrote: post #5

I use Delphi. The RAD Studio IDE is super featured and it's really easy to create interfaces. A nice feature is that the programs produced contain all dependencies so nothing else needs to be installed when distributing.

Delphi is excellent!

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

#29

Post by St_Alfonzo »

I use Common Lisp since 2 years now. Here in germany, most of the students I talked to classify CL as an unfashionable language..

I really like the simplicity of the syntax and the stability of the language standard/specification. There will be no "Today we released v2, all your v1 code will be invalid"

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

#30

Post by hatmatrix »

I 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 optimization and numerical precision before standardized by ANSI C, and because of the simpler language (than C) it's easier for scientists to code up fast programs. Also because of its 1-indexing and array notation, it's easier to translate math to Fortran code.

With the recent module system there is a feature like Python's 'from module import *' ('use module') which when people use will make the code hard to follow, but when invoked with 'use module, only: var1, var2, foo, bar', you can make what's imported more explicit.

Other than that, I just find it very aesthetically pleasing and makes me very happy to code in it. I have heard they have string processing "as good as C" now, but I haven't used it much.

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