191–200 of 338 posts
I've recently fallen for Standard ML. It's been a steep learning curve due to all the compilers and implementation choices but what a mind bending approach to software development. OCaml seems to be the obvious next step but I'm having fun with toy programs in Standard ML right now.
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.
Have you ever investigated writing your code for office automation using C#? It takes a little bit to get it figured out, but being able to get away from VBA is worth it I think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've written a bidirectional filesystem synchronization tool, and a content management system, in (nearly) pure bash. I keep expecting the performance to be terrible but it's surprisingly efficient.
The only thing I've found strongly lacking in bash is math. You can `| bc` all you want, but it still seems slow compared to other languages. I typically do all my math in python (typically through pipes... heh), and everything else in bash.
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 cod…
Anyway -- the problem with developing tests for the old software is that there is no unit testing framework. You'd have to develop that too and unless you really invested in it you would not have stats like code coverage. Mocking out parts of the system would likely also be difficult because the code in such systems is normally spaghetti and not well abstracted.
If you're lucky they have some standard test data that can be used to run through system tests -- but that's at a much higher level than TDD would ideally want. And I know the shop I worked at had nothing like that back in the day. Everything was tested by hand.
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 lang…
As someone fairly new to programming I don't understand what makes modern implementation of Lisp like Clojure better than its ancestor. I like Scheme because it's ridiculously flexible. You can implement as many libraries of your own as you want with Scheme which I doubt can easily be done in something like C++. To me Clojure is an overdesigned and rigid version of Lisp. Why is that considered good? Since I am new to…
* Enormous reach: access to both Java and Javascript ecosystems. (If you count ClojureScript. I don't know how Clojure CLR for .NET).
* Immutability by default. When you want state, its primitives help with concurrency.
* A good set of basic data structures, including lazy sequences.
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…
Hate to say it, but you'll want to upgrade to a later version than 8. There are a lot of exploits out for 8. Oh, that was the other crappy angle for ColdFusion I forgot to mention in my post - the $1500-and-up license fees.
Where is Ruby, D,go, Rust, Objective C, swift, ASP & Node?
Edit Go too.
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…
I use almost entirely ColdFusion (well, Railo). Never studied computer science so don't know any better. Wouldn't know what to transition to if I wanted to use anything else.