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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?

#181

Post by randomthrowr88 »

paulrpotts wrote: post #2

Lots and lots of C. (I'm mostly an embedded C programmer these days). Some C++ for a bit of higher-level "business logic" that benefits from a class-based approach, but a fairly limited subset of "modern" C++.

Serious question: How does one get into this C embedded stuff?

I'm addicted to low-level "embedded" type work. But all I hear back from are Django, RoR, $HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK, DevOps teams/recruiters.

Is there some buzzword or special topic to know and do a project in? Any suggestions for projects to display on GitHub, topics to know through and through (domain specific knowledge)?

I sit at work thinking all day about RasbPi sensor projects sitting on my workbench collecting dust due to job+young kids.

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

#182

Post by jdmichal »

sdegutis wrote: post #24
paulrpotts wrote: post #2

Lots and lots of C. (I'm mostly an embedded C programmer these days). Some C++ for a bit of higher-level "business logic" that benefits from a class-based approach, but a fairly limited subset of "modern" C++.

Plus if you don't need inheritance, you can just use pointers to structs and pass them to functions. And if you need simple polymorphism in some small places, you can use tagged unions.

This viewpoint is exactly why I like Rust. It has syntactic sugar to make things look like traditional objects, but everything is really a bundle of data with a set of associated static functions. (v-tables only appear with trait objects AFAIK, which are uncommon compared to templates.) And tagged unions are built in, with pattern-matching!

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

#184

Post by paulrpotts »

mzs wrote: post #168
paulrpotts wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, really? In 2017? Explain, please! You're deploying on 68K Macs?

not deployed on apple: http://inteng.fnal.gov/Integrated_Eng/irm/irmsoftware/IRMSof...

Ah, interesting. I used MPW a bit, but far more THINK C and CodeWarrior "back in the day." It is interesting to me that the MPW toolchain would still be useful.

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

#186

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

nsphere wrote: post #135
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #65

COBOL, definitely COBOL

Yeah me too. I can't wait to rewrite our code base in Java (not even being sarcastic), but at least we will be able to make our own objects and have recursion! Yay!

Lucky - you get to rewrite it.

Our COBOL comes from a software vendor, so rewriting it means waiting for them to decide that the cost of redeveloping decades of complex business logic in a new language/toolset outweighs the cost of supporting and enhancing these COBOL programs.

Fortunately it's a mostly read-only codebase. The number of times we've changed the COBOL code ourselves can probably be counted on one hand.

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

#187

Post by omnibrain »

Delphi

I'm in the process of "inheriting" a company whose sole product is a multi million LOC behemoth written in Delphi. The product itself is a highly customizeble/parametrizeable control software for business processes/alarm management build around a rule engine for rules drawn in a graphic editor.

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

#188

Post by davidwihl »

gwu78 wrote: post #163

assembly apl (k4) forth (bootloader) snobol (spitbol) C (small subset) sh (Almquist-like) sed (not GNU) nawk (do not use added functions such as strftime) execlineb

what in the world do you still write in snobol / spitbol? I haven't heard anyone even mention that language since 1983.

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

#189

Post by lacampbell »

therealmarv wrote: post #169

Taking a deep look into Lazarus/FreePascal/Object Pascal this year (because I can still code Pascal & VCL code in sleep nowadays). Want to see if it's good enough to develop a simple macOS, Linux and Windows application at the same time.

Why FreePascal over Qt for cross platform gui applications?

I had a contract doing C++/qt stuff 2015/2016. So I could conjure up my own reasons for and against. But I am curious about yours as I am largely ignorant of pascal.

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