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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?

#81
Smalltalk! I got in touch with it in university and I love it. I'm convinced it is the best OO language there is, and generally one of the best general purpose languages (and environments!) ever invented.

I even had the luck to be able to use it on my last job (VisualWorks), but unfortunately I no longer have that job :(

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

#82
I use Erlang/OTP as my go-to language. The flack about its ugly syntax certainly puts Erlang in the unfashionable camp. But unjustly. I use it because I like single assignment of variables, pattern-matching, and I also think FP is pretty swell. Someone said recently that the Erlang community could be as small as one-thousand serious hackers. Now that's relatively small!

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

#83
I use Awk fairly regularly, in the form of actual scripts (not just expressions passed on the command line). Despite its age, it's still extremely powerful and usually very pleasant to read and write. Gawk adds socket support, so writing network scripts is usually painless.

I've also been known to write Perl (5) and Tcl programs, but significantly less often nowadays.

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

#84

I am using PHP for my hobby project. It's "old" but obviously not abandoned and I think it's becoming a bit less ridiculed, but you still see the regular "Ew why PHP"-type remarks and other jokes about the language. I don't use it because of familiarity or comfort (I'm actually quite uncomfortable with it because I know it's easy to fall into traps of horrible practices). The simple answer is that as a kid I loved PH…

For front-end web projects, I still love using PHP+codeigniter.

However, for all back-end tasks, I now use Python. It has so many features that I wish were in PHP and it works well for long-running tasks.

Most long-running PHP tasks that I've tried to build, leak random memory. The dev list also scares me and some of the features that have been added to the latest versions are highly questionable.

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

#85
post #23

Earlier 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?

I'm pretty sure Altium Designer, a decent and pricey EDA suite, is written mostly in Delphi.

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

#86
post #8

Perl and C here mostly. C89, that is. Both are widely used languages, just not in the startup space. a lot of our stuff is built on those languages so it wouldn't make sense to rewrite a lot of the stuff at this point unless there was a business case for it.

So I'm not alone :) Perl and C everyday ;)

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

#87
post #47

My 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 :)

He didn't say his father was still sane ;-)

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

#88
I predominantly work in Perl 5, which probably isn't quite to the point of being something one can write off completely as out of the spotlight. And, I'm launching a new thing soon which, despite having looked at a number of alternatives, will likely also be in Perl. Familiarity and a big ecosystem that I'm already familiar with is a pretty big win.

I happen to work in the systems management space, which was long dominated by Perl (Python ate into that space starting a decade or so ago, and Go is now making significant inroads, but Perl is still pretty common), so the libraries are very strong. I may end up writing the prototype in Perl just to get it launched, and then rewrite the parallel parts in Go. It is an embarrassingly parallelizable problem, so Go or another language very good at concurrency would be reasonable. But, I find that learning a new language and tackling a new problem space at the same time is challenging. The front end will always be JavaScript, though. Probably with React.

And, I've been working in PHP a bunch lately, because our website runs on Drupal. I would never use PHP except to get access to the massive piles of existing functionality out there already in PHP. But, nonetheless that makes a pretty compelling case for using PHP. And, maybe PHP is still popular enough to not fall into this category. Heck it may even be growing, given the popularity of WordPress, I dunno.

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