Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 502 posts

Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#121

Post by paulrpotts »

dmcginty wrote: post #62

I really want to write something in 6502 assembly this year. I've read tutorials and played with it, but I've never used it to build a non-trivial program. I've also been wanting to build a NES emulator in common lisp, and this would be the perfect opportunity to pair the two projects.

Have you seen the game called Human Resource Machine?

This is not actually a joke comment -- it teaches assembly language programming. Not 6502 specifically, but the fake architecture looks a lot like 6502. You work up through a set of more and more challenging assignments until you have to write a sort. I really enjoyed it and would consider it a great introduction to basically any assembly language.

Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#122

Post by danso »

shaftway wrote: post #117
geebee wrote: post #70

SQL. 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 inn…

I still teach SQL, via SQLite, as a first language to students, even though in practice I do 90% of my data analysis through the command line or Pandas. But SQL is very direct and clear as a language, and the overhead of SQLite is...well, light. Making an index is just one more line of code that for many datasets, you run once and never touch again.

What do you find simpler in terms of data querying and management?

Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#123

Post by alfalfasprout »

aloukissas wrote: post #15

Most of my work is in C++, which is almost 35 years old. By far the best choice of language for cross-platform, client application development, especially C++11/C++14, which bring modern language features (e.g. lambdas, futures, etc) with all the original benefits of the language.

Hands down the best thing about C++ for me is that with modern C++ you can write relatively safe clean code while taking advantage of decades of robust libraries.

Yeah, Rust is a big step forward in some respects, but it'll be almost a decade before we see it catch up to C++'s incredible ecosystem. C++ is almost the lingua franca of finance, for instance.

Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#124

Post by paulrpotts »

lgessler wrote: post #9

MUMPS. Despite its strong resemblance to compiler IR and lack of a type system, it is the standard DB in Health IT in America.

Oddly enough I just got a recruiter spam message for a MUMPS developer position. I had never heard of it, but I thought to myself "why would I want to develop mumps???"

Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#126

Post by p333347 »

c++ 03. (This works well for me and never felt a need to switch to newer versions beyond using a few things here and there like auto, with new meaning. I have been using latest Visual Studio Express versions since 2010 so this 'mix' has no problem. I don't write code to be backward compatible compiler wise so on that count also its not a problem.)

Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#127

Post by alfalfasprout »

hprotagonist wrote: post #34

I do scientific computing in academia. Secretly, it's just fortran all the way down, and LaTeX for document preparation. Piled on top of that is a fair amount of matlab, simulink, and python.

You know, modern Fortran isn't awful. Fortran 77 code however, is frighteningly ugly to look at.

Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#128

Post by Kiro »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #94
macintux wrote: post #5

My job is almost entirely Erlang, which is now 30 years old.

Telecom?

Amazon, Facebook, WhatsApp and a lot of companies use Erlang. It's not only used in telecom even though it was made by Ericsson.

EDIT: Removed the "naive" part.

Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#130

Post by paulrpotts »

PeCaN wrote: post #40

C++98 with a few C++11 features for work (our compiler is not really C++11 compliant at all, but it does have move semantics). Ada for fun, though I'd say Ada 2012 is a bit like C++11 in terms of “basically a new language”. People do seem to have a perception of Ada as ‘old’, though I'm not sure why (it is, by my account, more ‘modern’ than, say, Go – actually, it's not unlike Go with a nice generics system).

Good for you -- I am not a fan of most of the latest C++ features; it feels again like a crazy research project. Although I _am_ excited about uniform initialization (finally), despite that fact that there are slight syntax and parsing confusion issues that arise from backward compatibility (as always, in C++).
Post reply on HN