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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?

#241

Post by ptaipale »

libraryatnight wrote: post #151
chubot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not a native English speaker. I could throw in that the best thing regarding learning I did (in addition to buying a home computer) was to get J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (which came with the adventure game) which in turn led me to read LOTR and then other books in English, and generally become much more fluent.

Later on, wasting time reading NNTP news at the uni was also actually a good investment for learning the language in a way that is useful at work.

For my kids, the games have again been the same thing, along with Harry Potter books.

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

#242

Post by oblib »

Perl and Javascript.

I make web apps and started using Perl for cgi scripts back in `97 and still use it. Most of my app code now runs on the client side with Javascript so I don't do much with perl anymore but I still use it for most everything on the backend.

Learning to code something with new or different languages is not something I do without good cause and/or necessity. I haven't ran into that much building web apps.

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

#243

Post by Insanity »

Kiro wrote: post #128
throwaway7645 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess Whatsapp's purpose is similar to that of telecom though, but that is my naive interpretation of what is done in whatsapp and telecom using Erlang.

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

#244

Post by nickpsecurity »

omnibrain wrote: post #187

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.

Reminds me of Gensym G2 back when I studied expert systems.

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

#246

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

Hard to imagine how it's to live in a company that has no database. But I do take issue with that:

> It isn't you I hate SQL, it's what I have to think about when I use you.

Do you live at the fringe of performance like that? Nobody spends much time thinking about those things, and the few times that require thinking about them would require thinking about much more complicated things if you weren't using a database.

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

#247

Post by ptaipale »

Insanity wrote: post #212
stinkytaco wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that clear notetaking is amazing in guiding discussions. Being the one who sends out the meeting summary with next actions and clarifying remarks or being able to refer back to meeting notes gives me an amazing power in making decisions or resolving disputes. Just because I'm the one who's writing stuff down, I'm somehow given the authority to say "this is what we decided at the meeting".

Absolutely! Can I ask if you are taking these nodes the old fashioned way with pen and paper or are you using a program to do this? I myself have found out that during meetings I prefer to use a pen and paper but it is mostly just notes that I take for myself.

Touch-typing was probably the best thing that elementary school taught me :)

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

#249

Post by maxxxxx »

danso wrote: post #122
shaftway wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The functionality of SQL is great but I really wish it would like more look like other programming languages. I wonder how SQL would look like if someone would design it now.

It also should integrate easier with other languages. Using SQL from C# or C++ is a real pain with tons of casts and string manipulation. Better debugging would also be nice.

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