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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?

#111

Post by woodruffw »

oskarth wrote: post #99
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.

Hmm...I haven't published many of my Gawk scripts, but here's a simple little IRC bot using Gawk sockets: http://woodruffw.us/snippets#awkbot

The general procedure for using a Gawk socket is just building a string of the form `/inet/tcp/0/example.com/80` (example.com, port 80) and redirecting to/from it as a coprocess with `|&`.

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

#112

Post by mveety »

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…

I was an OpenVMS sysadmin and C/COBOL/BASIC programmer writing code for mostly storing tons of data and sending it off to other places. Hopefully though, now that HP spun off the VMS engineering team and the talk of an amd64 port coming in 9 they won't have to move.

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

#113

Post by thorin »

Most of my programming has been done in pl/sql. It's still the best language for interacting with a relational db I've seen. I've just started using c# and when I pick up some more linq I think I might like it. I also program in javascript, java and c is just that plsql has been the best way to get stuff done for me working with enterprise db apps since the late 90s.

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

#114

Post by smartmic »

Using an 'unfashionable' language is similar to other areas in life where one rejects mainstream or too modern things for obvious reasons: - Be different. - Use something which is extraordinarily suited or especially made for your task at hand (in other words: do not compromise). - Maturity and stability is great.

Please add more. The analogies are manifold.

I really like modern re-implementations of well proven languages (Clojure <- Lisp, Factor <- Forth, ...)

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

#115

Post by joosters »

ukoms wrote: post #86
drelihan wrote: 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 ;)

Perl and C++ here. You are making me feel modern and up to date :-)

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

#116

Post by api »

I write a lot of C and C++. Considered Java for a recent Web api backend project but went with node in the end due to the richness of available libraries, somewhat quicker development for simpler things, and lower cognitive load from same language on both sides. I still sort of prefer strongly typed languages though. I hate the idea of bugs at runtime that a compiler might have caught.

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

#117

Post by torgoguys »

mistermann wrote: post #66
0XAFFE wrote: 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?

Last I knew Skype (at least for Windows) was written in Delphi. That knowledge is a few years old so may no longer be true post-Microsoft acquisition.

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

#118

Post by marshray »

Rockslide wrote: post #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 :(

I tried Smalltalk recently, but I couldn't get into it:

1. The (basically mandatory) UI was keyboard unfriendly

2. They removed multiple inheritance from the language. That's not still Smalltalk, is it?

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

#119

Post by goerz »

I've been using Fortran 90/95 extensively over the last few years, for numerical simulation of quantum systems. I think there's a lot of misconceptions about Fortran (which is partly due to Fortran 77, with its punchcard format and spaghetti code). Fortran 90 is basically a different language, and is actually reasonably modern. I see it as significantly more suitable for numerical programming than C/C++. Fortran is conceptually much simpler than C. Having multi-dimensional arrays at the core of the language and not having to deal with pointers makes it much harder to shoot yourself in the foot, and yields more robust and easier to read code. Also, Fortran beats any other language (including C) in terms of speed. I would not recommend using it outside of numerical applications, but in its niche, it's pretty much perfect. For more high-level tasks I mostly use Python.

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

#120

Post by mwpmaybe »

harel wrote: post #101

Although I mainly write code in Python, JavaScript and Go, I have a SaaS web application that was written in the early 2000s using ColdFusion (CFML) which I still support (started at v5 and now runs on v8). In the mid to late nineties (and early 00s) it was one of the best ways to write web applications (it was actually the first Application server as far as I know). But today is 2016 and ColdFusion is one of the lea…

ColdFusion was a breath of fresh air in the mid-to-late '90s when the predominant technologies were CGI/Perl and ASP/VBScript (pre-.NET). I used to love showing other programmers e.g. "Here's how you create a database connection, execute a query, and iterate through a recordset in ASP (40 lines of opaque nonsense)... and here's how you do it in ColdFusion (cfquery, cfloop)." It enabled us to quickly deliver a lot of intranets and e-commerce sites for our customers, but man oh man did it require a lot of server hardware to run (at the time), and it was expensive as heck!
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