Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by nadgob » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 8:51 PM UTC

codewritinfool wrote: post #27

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!

I used to program in Delphi between 1997-1999 and after that I couldn't get even close in terms of productivity with Java. It wasn't the language though, the strongest thing about the Delphi environment was that it was truly comprehensive and you'd just go in and implement your business logic.

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

#92

Post by simonswords82 » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 8:53 PM UTC

deusu wrote: post #34

Pascal - still use it today. I started with Turbo Pascal 3.0, went through several versions of Borland Pascal (DOS and Windows), several versions of Delphi, and am now using FreePascal. I do most of my work on Linux nowadays. Pascal still gets everything done and after 20+ years I am really fluent in it. Did a little bit of Javascript with Node.js, also looked at Golang. While I did like some aspects of them, there w…

Holy cow! I used Pascal at college about 16 years ago. I never thought I would see it used in the wild, especially in 2016. Nicely done!

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

#93

Post by jerryr » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:00 PM UTC

baobrien wrote: post #85

mistermann wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I believe it is too. And its primary scripting language is still DelphiScript. We use it daily at my company.

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

#94

Post by 8note » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:00 PM UTC

hitekker wrote: post #42

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…

My TI 89 runs BASIC.

...but it also gives me access to great symbolic manipulation tools, which more than makes up for it.

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

#95

Post by m0nty » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:05 PM UTC

Fizzadar wrote: post #90

Bash. I'm obsessed - so much so that I'll solve more complex problems taking 3x time rather than falling back to Python. And then there's bash one-liners, they're the best!

I too love bash. It's always there. It has no dependencies. It works.

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

#96

Post by thanksalot » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

jhallenworld wrote: post #50

Anyone use ABAP (language for SAP)? I think you can get paid a lot of money as an ABAP programmer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP

I did UC4 stuff for a while.

Was pretty fun but making separate applications is often the better idea.

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

#97

Post by tyre » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:11 PM UTC

hitekker wrote: post #42

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…

That rewrite sounds like a great project to pair with junior developers on.

It has all of the optimal features:

1) You pretty much have to TDD, but it isn't hard to because you can start by writing tests that the old software passes as your "spec".

2) It actually matters if it works. As a junior dev, one of the hardest parts about giving a shit was that the tasks I was given often didn't matter.

The quality of my code when I was younger scaled exponentially with the challenge and meaningfulness. As is true with many immature youths, I only acted like it mattered when it mattered.

3) A senior engineer would likely enjoy refactoring/rewriting something like this. Focus on getting it right, take time to craft elegant solutions, etc. Plus you get to teach someone

4) Large company with resources and domain to take a long-term outlook on the problem. UBS isn't going anywhere (I hope), so they are incentivized to take longer to write a solution that lasts another few decades. They can also take the time to train a junior developer without worrying that they'll miss their metrics for the next funding round.

Honestly it sounds like a blast. Sign me up!

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

#98

Post by wfn » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:13 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #62

Gaessaki wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Contact the companies looking for COBOL coders. They're desperate, and will tell you exactly what you need to learn and probably pay for any training you need. Sure they'd prefer someone with a decade or five of experience, but seriously: COBOL coders are literally dying off at this point. 17 years ago was the last great hurrah for hiring & training COBOL developers, averting the "Y2K crisis" before calendars ticked…

I wonder, are there any good tools for translating COBOL into something else? There must be at least some demand? Wouldn't that be a good approach in some cases? (I suppose it requires longer-term thinking, and is sometimes simply not possible in a business context, etc.)

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

#99

Post by oskarth » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #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.

Do you have some examples of network scripts written in Gawk? Particularly something that you'd prefer to write in Gawk rather than in a more "general-purpose" language. Would be interesting to see.

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

#100

Post by Semiapies » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

I still support websites I previously wrote in CFML, aka ColdFusion. It was much nicer to work with than the alternatives on Windows, many years back, and it running atop Java since version 6 often turned out to be handy. It wasn't a bad way to bash out a website, and with some care, you could build decent stuff with it.

Still, it's a loosely-typed (except when it isn't) language that exists in two forms - tag-based and Algol-ish (within tags) - and it carries a lot of Java-derived complexity in is API while not being as flexible as even JavaScript.

Lately, I've been using Python and Flask to build sites in, which is far nicer.