I use VBA for automating the production of pharmaceutical analytics reports, and have for the past 8 years. It is horrible in so many ways, but as far as I've found has the best support for manipulating the MS Office DOM, which is important because all the pharma reps use Excel/PowerPoint for everything and tend to have very specific nit-picky needs regarding their custom reports.
Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
41–50 of 338 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#42My 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 business. Every day. Surprisingly for enterprise software, his customers love it. They are only being forced to move to a completely new system since HP went and deprecated their entire minicomputer line.
Given this and other parts of the story-- perhaps better saved for a blog post-- I've always seen him as my 10x engineer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer, just so we're all on the same page.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#43I use JavaScript to develop web applications in the financial sector. The runtime is a rusty bucket held together with duct tape, the language is dangerous and awkward to work with, and the ecosystem is utterly schizophrenic. Still, the money is good, so why not?
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#44There'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 wants to learn, but that nobody knows where to learn it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? What else have you used?
Why not? It's your fault, if you don't revisit PHP. A lot has changed since PHP3 days. The same goes for MySQL. Yet there are a lot of ill-informed haters. But to each their own. PHP is the dynamic language cousin of C/C++. PHP7 and HHVM are both great and fast.
While I'm not particularly keen on revisiting PHP, given the bad taste it left me with, I can believe the language has changed for the better, however programming cultures, like all cultures, are way more inertia-prone, and I'm really sceptical about whether the duct tape mentality I've known PHP devs to exhibit has gone away
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#46We 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 the one thing i've never seen anywhere else. I can make a program and GUI, and have it run on windows, linux, osx, and the web without any changes. And the "native" programs can run entirely client side, or they can behave as a "thin client" to a server somewhere, again without any changes.
We haven't moved away because moving away would basically mean replacing every single line of code ever written here... But we are slowly replacing it with more modern languages and systems.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#47My 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…
"He writes bank software. In BASIC. For forty years. At the same company"
I would have gone insane :)
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#48Most 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…
Come on, PHP is hardly old or unfashionable
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#49I use JavaScript to develop web applications in the financial sector. The runtime is a rusty bucket held together with duct tape, the language is dangerous and awkward to work with, and the ecosystem is utterly schizophrenic. Still, the money is good, so why not?
Oh, look, we got a comedian
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#50Anyone use ABAP (language for SAP)? I think you can get paid a lot of money as an ABAP programmer.