possibly datalog
Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
111–120 of 502 posts
Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
#112Tcl. It works really well as a cross-platform (*nix/Windows) alternative to shell scripting that doesn't suffer from the same problems as the POSIX shell (see http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.h... ). It builds on the same foundation of everything being text but with a few changes to the substitution rules builds something a lot like a Lisp on top of it.
Ditto. It's original purpose as an embedded scripting language for C programs still stands.
Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
#113- sh (I really don't use bash features in scripting) - awk - perl - sed, if that counts as language. It's funny that a course that I took in university almost 29 years ago, for learning the use of Unix scripting tools, is one of the most useful learning experiences in my daily work today - even if my job is not really a programmer. But very often I see colleagues (project managers, architects etc) struggle with proce…
As always there's a relevant xkcd. https://xkcd.com/519/
The mouse over text is even truer.
Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
#114Perl is one of those languages that nobody likes at my work, but that is impossible to get rid of. Java is in the same boat, but at least it's still marketable so engineers don't mind working with it as much.
I once worked at a place that basically just used perl server side. In this decade (2010s). The codebase was just one tangled mess.
They told a story of a guy who failed the cultural interview because he told a VP "you can't write a large web app in perl", and of course they had done just that. With the reflection of hind sight I think despite the obvious empirical counter factual, he was on to something. It really was an uphill battle against the language to do things large scale.
Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
#115mostly C here
Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
#116- python: my general purpose go-to language
- sh/awk/sed (I don't really think of these as separate languages): mainly for scripting things that aren't worth firing up python for or that are easier to script this way
- javascript: for web front ends
- html/css: ditto
- possibly c: for particular things where I need more speed/control over memory than python can provide
Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
#117SQL. If I had to pick a language that I'll use my entire career that's the one. It has been overused and underused, but always relevant.
I love that I'm at a company that I haven't had to use SQL. I don't know if I could even find a relational database here.
But in a classic meme sense: "It isn't you I hate SQL, it's what I have to think about when I use you." I don't want to spend my time thinking about database indexes, query plans, or other complicated bits. I just want to get my data out.
Sometimes I struggle, and I'd give anything for a plain inner join, but on the whole I like this tradeoff.
Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
#118Pascal/Delphi Before there was an internet of lightbulbs and smoke detectors, there was an internet of industrial process things. And they used windows 2000 and Delphi. They still do.
Same here but MPW Pascal with 68K Asm.
What, really? In 2017? Explain, please!
You're deploying on 68K Macs?
Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
#119Lisp, and specifically Common Lisp although the latter isn't that old.
It first appeared in 1984 and the ANSI specification was finished in 1994, but it traces its lineage directly back to Lisp 1.5 from 1962. It can run Lisp sources decades older than it trivially.
It is a very practical, multi-paradigm language with high quality, high performance implementations on many platforms.
Its main issue is that it is not very popular, but that might also be a blessing.