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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?

#261

Post by codeonfire »

I use visual basic to pay my bills in Excel. It's unique in that Microsoft has never seen fit to integrate any other language into Excel. It has a large following in finance and other business disciplines. Companies have also undertaken year long concentrated development efforts solely to produce Excel spreadsheets (and VB macros) that run their business.

What can you learn? That a poorly thought out language will become incredibly popular if it is the only thing integrated with an extremely popular application. Make the language ubiquitous by tying it to an application.

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

#262

Post by yaowenjiaozi »

pvaldes wrote: post #174
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 :(

Hum, I played also first time with smalltalk some months ago and even installed squeak, but can't avoid feeling the "what I could done with this thing?" sensation. Lots of games and cartoons moving in the screen. Should I push stronger?

Look up Niall Ross's summaries of Smalltalk conferences over the years: http://www.esug.org/data/ReportsFromNiallRoss/. They show interesting stuff that people do with Smalltalk and will help you decide whether Smalltalk is for you.

Personally, Smalltalk rocks!

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

#264

Post by tikwidd »

I use PowerBuilder (of Sybase) at my job. We have a database centric stack mainly built with stored procedures and PowerBuilder works pretty well (PowerBuilder datawindows just represent a SELECT query or point to a stored procedure). It's very legacy. The syntax is similar to BASIC, with some SQL database querying built in as a kind of DSL. The built-in string and array libraries are particularly bad.

The Powerbuilder IDE rebuilds the object you're working on whenever you save, so if there are any errors you can't save the file from within the IDE. You can't view or edit a script and its ancestor at the same time. When source control is switched on, you can't save a file without checking it out first - but you can't check it out without closing it and discarding any changes you made. I usually have Notepad++ open alongside PowerBuilder at all times.

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

#265

Post by thedanfilter »

tunesmith wrote: post #158
pillmuncher wrote: post #57

Prolog. It fits my brain.

I really suspect Prolog would fit my brain, but I have trouble thinking of real-world scenarios where it would be useful to hack in. Other than the tutorials out there that focus on toy problems, what are some other examples of where Prolog is actually a good technology fit for side projects?

Do a google search for: prolog robotics

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

#266

Post by kpil »

ams6110 wrote: post #196
tyre wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I assume the original system is Business BASIC or something like it. I used that in one of my first dev jobs in the 1990s at an investment bank. All their internal systems were written in Business BASIC. They had moved off of the original vendor's hardware and were running it on PA-RISC HPUX servers. Anyway -- the problem with developing tests for the old software is that there is no unit testing framework. You'd hav…

Vms basic, most likely.

Main problem is not the lack of frameworks, it's a whole different culture of how to test...

Unfortunately, for the banks, they've not managed to maintain their withering infrastructure for a lot of reasons, and are just now realizing the threath from 'Fintechs' that are run by people that actually understands software development.

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

#267

Post by stephenjromero »

I can't say I still write in it but my first programming job was supporting legacy Classic ASP systems.

After one year only writing in ASP I started learning VB.NET and all the things I learned from ASP helped me pick it up really easy.

But it still haunts my dreams.

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

#268

Post by kpil »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #188
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…

Man, someone should just build an open source clone of HP's platform and keep the dream alive. If only there were a drifting entrepreneur nearby interested in a doting customer base of Swiss banks wrapped up in a bow....

There are some products that can generate c++ from vms basic and implements a vms-like runtime on linux...

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

#270

Post by St_Alfonzo »

bsharitt wrote: post #234
St_Alfonzo wrote: post #29

I use Common Lisp since 2 years now. Here in germany, most of the students I talked to classify CL as an unfashionable language.. I really like the simplicity of the syntax and the stability of the language standard/specification. There will be no "Today we released v2, all your v1 code will be invalid"

I'm curious since you mention students, so you may be one as well, but is Common Lisp just a hobby language for you, or do you have a productive professional use?

I'm a computer science student and will get my master's degree in October. At the moment Common Lisp is just my hobby language, but also the language in which I invest most of my programming/learning time. I'm able to program in a few mainstream languages, but I want to have one language where I really know the tricks and shortcuts.

Getting a job here, where I would program in CL is nearly impossible. So in the next years I'll probably stay in the academic world and then try to do my own startup or freelance stuff with the language(s) I like.

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