201–210 of 502 posts
Progress Openedge. I have never seen anyone on HN mentions it. The codebase is from the 90'. before that, I have worked with a codebase from the 80s, 10 years older than me.
I feel your pain. :-D
Emacs Lisp. I want to port all my remaining sh awk and perl stuff to it, and I'll havee some time to do that in the coming weeks. Also, m4. I use it together with awk and bmake for a couple websites. I plan to port awk scripts to sth. else though, I keep forgetting awk.
Emacs lisp is just so immensely sticky... once you cross the initial "what's up with this crappy lisp?" threshold, and have a finger caught in its web, you suddenly just want to put your hands all in. And then find more hands to add to the pot. I expect it to stay around a good, decent while :)
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.
On the plus side, Delphi is quite easy to read. I got started with no prior knowledge in Delphi or Pascal, and I was able to roughly understand significant parts of the application within a few days.
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?
purpose: sysadmin, automation, server-side programming, daemon, shell / interactive shell, command-line tools etc.
well ... it's not that old (cerca 2006) but it is considered dead LOL
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I studied English lol. My whole career is based on my weekends. My education helps me write eloquent email responses, though.
Eloquent email responsed are not to be underestimated, being able to communicate in clear language is a valuable skill.
I have been using it professionally for 5+ years as a full-time employee at various companies. Some big-name ones, some smaller start-up ones. The mean Lisp team size has been around 4, but I did work on a project of 15 Lisp programmers. None of these projects were legacy code. Some were in places you wouldn't expect (embedded, multi-processor systems on custom-designed boards, for example). In every single case, we had no additional trouble hiring a Lisp or Lisp-capable programmer as compared to hiring for any other language, including Python. (In fact, Python was more difficult to hire for because the market is saturated with beginners who claim expertise.)
Lisp is one of those languages where the ratio of long-term benefits and productivity vs. good initial impressions is at a record high. It doesn't look like C or Python or JS, with all the parentheses, so people brush it off.
Lisp isn't the pinnacle of every great idea to come about in computer science and software engineering, but it is one of the most robust, macroscopically well designed, and most productive languages for translating arbitrary abstract ideas into maintainable, production code. Even if it doesn't look initially very pretty in the eyes of a career Python programmer.