I really like PHP.
Hardly "unfashionable"
Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
51–60 of 338 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#52Earlier 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…
> This sounds like other similar language will not get the job done. That's not what they're saying. If someone knows a tool and it works for them, then it's more immediately useful than another tool which they don't yet know how to use, or how well it works. > 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. Quantify "better". P…
>Quantify "better"
Better as in more correct. The endless gotchas in the language makes it harder to write correct programs that works as intended by the programmer.
>so if you want to do something with it, almost certainly someone else has tried to do the same thing, so there will be libraries for it, guides, people who you can ask for help if you have trouble.
That is more or less true for the alternatives as well (Python, Ruby, Javascript...)
>This is true of dynamic languages generally.
Yes. that is why I emphasized "a lot more"...
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#53Java and XML. I'm an Android developer.
Not quite "unfashionable" give it's the most used language by many a metric
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#54There's a huge difference between languages that are no longer fashionable, call them old-fashioned, and languages that never had wide following, if any, call them niche languages. Most of the languages you mention were never mainstream production languages, for good reasons.
You are surely joking. Do you really mean to say that Cobol is not a mainstream language? Are you claiming that banks and similar institutions are niches? If that is the case then pretty much all programming languages are niche languages.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#55Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#56I 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 memory situations, and it is high-level enough that the implementor can optimize persistent storage to get speed gains that other languages can only meet by including very low-level code. It has built-in concurrency, again at a high level which allows the implementor a lot of leeway in making things more efficient.
As a niche language, it has specialized uses in Medical Computing and in Financial Computing. Its sparse data structures organized around strings of character is very suited to dynamic data (as a NOSQL datastore) and its handling of transaction processing and concurrency allows retractable computation as well as ACID data storage.
I am proud to call myself a MUMPSter.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#57Prolog. It fits my brain.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#58Earlier 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.
>It's your fault, if you don't revisit PHP. A lot has changed since PHP3 days.
Wow. You make a lot of assumptions. I have been using Php until quite recently. I left it at 5.6. I know about 7. But that it is getting additions does not compensate for the fact that the core remains rotten, and is still as dangerous and weird as ever.
It does not get much worse than this
https://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/comments/41fqib/it_is_so_sim...
Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
#59[deleted]