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

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

#151

Post by libraryatnight »

chubot wrote: post #71
shanemhansen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always there's a relevant xkcd. https://xkcd.com/519/

Too true. When I was 13 or so, I read the DOS 5.0 manual from cover to cover. If I recall, a lot of it was about batch files (autoexec.bat and stuff). Batch was really my first "programming" experience. Then when I was 22, after a good computer science education, my first job was working at EA, and the build system involved a bunch of batch files. That knowledge from nearly a decade before came in handy! The CS stuff…

I studied English lol. My whole career is based on my weekends. My education helps me write eloquent email responses, though.

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

#154

Post by moxious »

myblake wrote: post #114
cle wrote: post #18

Perl 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 w…

It's not impossible, it's a cultural mismatch. Perl is obscenely permissive, which makes it a really interesting and weird language.

But when you work in a big team and make something complex, you want something that's consistent. All of that permissiveness and flexibility bites you.

Now, with good styling guides and linting, you can make it work for complex software with a big team, but that's culturally pretty anti-perl. We're trying to do that with Javascript now, which isn't as weird as perl, but has many of the same excesses that you want to reign in with a style guide.

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

#155

Post by pjmlp »

noonespecial wrote: post #7

Pascal/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.

One of the companies that works with us in health care projects do all their Windows products in Delphi and AFAIK they don't plan to change anytime soon.

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

#156

Post by achileas »

myblake wrote: post #114
cle wrote: post #18

Perl 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 w…

In my company we primarily use Perl, but it's just on my team for our ETL pipeline. It works really well, especially since we modernized our older code and enforced really tight code standards. To use Perl end to end, well, there are modules for that (such as Dancer), but I can't comment on them because I've never had to use them.

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

#157

Post by pjmlp »

yawaramin wrote: post #60
ijidak wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Before there was an internet of lightbulbs and smoke detectors" Hahaha. That was good. Delphi is used heavily at my company to process millions of transactions a day, in the credit card industry. I myself am a C# developer though. But I respect Delphi's performance and relatively clean syntax.

That's funny because Anders Hejlsberg was the chief architect of both Delphi and C#.

Hence why I consider a big error to have created the CLR in first place.

Now we kind of got .NET Native, but it still isn't 100% done.

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

#158

Post by weltonhead »

BLISS. The system programming language for PDP and VAX computers from Digital Equipment Corporation. Think "high-level assembly language". Powerful, elegant, simple, totally unforgiving. The world's most powerful chainsaw, without a chain guard.

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

#160

Post by achileas »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #93
mfontani wrote: post #64

Perl 5, of course! It's an awesome language and both the language and the ecosystem is getting better and better all the time

What do you do in Perl?

Not the OP, but in my company we use it for our ETL pipeline. I've grown to really enjoy it as a language.
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