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

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261–270 of 502 posts

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

#261

For the last 2.5 years I've been doing RPG - both the newer free form and older fixed. I can imagine I'll be doing it a lot more within the next year also. A lot of people give it hate, but it's a pretty simple language after you use it a lot. It's possible I will start to write C++ also.

I think you mean RPGLE? :) I'll be doing a little bit of it this year, hopefully it will be the last... :/

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

#262
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.

People mention it here on occasion for how it handles string processing. Experts in such things might want to dive deep in a review of it for the rest of us.

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

#263

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.

IMO, it's more than not awful, it's great! I wish I had picked it up sooner as a mid-level language for mathematical and scientific computing (over C++). Additionally, you can connect Fortran to Python dead simple with `f2py`.

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

#264
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever benchmark it against Lua? But yea a whole lot more people use Perl.

Lua feels awkward to me when used as a standalone scripting language. When embedded into a C host applications, it is really nice, though. There is also a port of Lua 5.2 to Go, which has a slighty confusing API (to me, at least), but the documentation makes up for that.

I use Lua standalone and I gotta say I love it :)

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

#267
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fascinating! And you keep old Macs around to run the toolchain on?

Been using emulators for years - first classic or whatever it was called on OSX, then basilliskII/sheepshaver, and now mpw:

https://github.com/ksherlock/mpw

Here's the end of a Makefile, very unix-like:

  APPL = ${TYPE}${NAME}
  DATA = DATA${NAME}
  OBJS = ${NAME}.p.o
  LIBS = ../WordSum.asm.o ../LASysLib.a.o ../PasLib.o
  
  LANG = C
  
  MPWC = /usr/local/bin/mpw
  
  AS = Asm
  AFLAGS = 
  
  CC = SC
  CFLAGS = -mc68020 -mc68881 -b2 -Opt all 
  
  PC = Pascal
  PFLAGS = -mc68020 -mc68881
  
  LD = Link
  LDFLAGS = -w -t LApp -c MPWX -m MAIN -sg ${NAME}
  #    Link -w -t TEXT -c RWG1 -rt CODE -m HELPLOOP -sg HELPLOOP
  
  CFMFLAGS =
  # CFM = ${MPW:/mpw=/cfm}
  # CFM = /usr/local/bin/cfm
  CFM = cfm
  
  # TFTPFLAGS = -vt
  TFTPFLAGS =
  # TFTP = ${MPW:/mpw=/tftptool}
  # TFTP = /usr/local/bin/tftptool
  TFTP = tftptool
  
  .SUFFIXES : .p.o .p .c.o .c .asm.o .asm
  
  .phoney : all clean install
  
  all : ${APPL} ${DATA}
  
  .asm.asm.o :
  	${MPWC} $(MPWFLAGS) $(AS) $(AFLAGS) $mult.asm
  
  mult : mult.asm.o
  	$(MPWC) $(MPWFLAGS) $(LD) $(LDFLAGS) $

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

#268
post #6

- sh (I really don't use bash features in scripting) - awk - perl - sed, if that counts as language. It's funny that a course that I took in university almost 29 years ago, for learning the use of Unix scripting tools, is one of the most useful learning experiences in my daily work today - even if my job is not really a programmer. But very often I see colleagues (project managers, architects etc) struggle with proce…

Any suggestions for a bash scripting tutorial to help me better connect the dots? Over the years I've learned some nifty one-liners, but I'm not really familiar enough with the patterns and art of of command-line thinking to solve my own problems in bash. Most of the bash resources I've found online are just loosely organized collections of magic spells. I'd really like to get better at it though.

The resource that has been instrumental for me to move up from beginner-that-generally-can-work-out-things-with-a-lot-of-random-tries, to someone who often has things right on the first try, and if not, have a clue of what is going on , has been the following book:

Classic Shell Scripting Arnold Robbins, Nelson H.F. Beebe

Recommend it to anyone with a basic understanding and a will to learn more. It also really doubles as a rich information resource. Cannot recommend it enough if books are your thing.

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

#269
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.

I occasionally pull out SNOBOL4 as a less-awful awk, mostly for poking around/formatting logs and such. Not a bad language honestly. It's aged very well.

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

#270
post #6

- sh (I really don't use bash features in scripting) - awk - perl - sed, if that counts as language. It's funny that a course that I took in university almost 29 years ago, for learning the use of Unix scripting tools, is one of the most useful learning experiences in my daily work today - even if my job is not really a programmer. But very often I see colleagues (project managers, architects etc) struggle with proce…

Any suggestions for a bash scripting tutorial to help me better connect the dots? Over the years I've learned some nifty one-liners, but I'm not really familiar enough with the patterns and art of of command-line thinking to solve my own problems in bash. Most of the bash resources I've found online are just loosely organized collections of magic spells. I'd really like to get better at it though.

I would recommend two things: 1. Read the "bash" man page about once a year, and 2. Learn Perl or Python or something for the harder tasks.

It's helpful to learn some more about bash, and there's some good stuff in there. But shell scripts above a few dozen lines tops are a bad idea, and even those "few dozen" lines need a surprising amount of armoring with "set -e" and such.

I don't think this is because bash is bad. I've come to the conclusion that there's a fundamental tension between interactive use and safe programmatic use, and anything really good at the one is not going to be good at the other. In particular, interactive users more-or-less want the shell to accept inputs that are a bit sloppy, because they can interactively recover from the vast bulk of misinterpretations immediately, whereas a program becomes very risky with the same level of sloppiness because it will quite likely just keep going, doing very bad crazy stuff. (Which is why all my shell scripts tend to start with "set -e", which amounts to "If you get confused... STOP, instead of trashing an arbitrary amount of state.")

And again let me emphasize #1. By splitting my world up into interactive use and programmatic use, I've made my peace with shell, and I don't hate it or anything. I use a lot of the features interactively. For instance, I do a lot of little loops on the command line. Often I'll build them up with some "echo"s done to make sure that it's about to do what I think it will do. There's a lot of great ways to save time in interactive bash (or zsh or whatever), and the best part is, in interactive use you can be as crazy efficient as you want and there are no software engineering implications. Writing bash scripts with every crazy sophisticated trick in the books starts raising software engineering issues fast, and worst of all, some of them are quite invisible ("what if you run this in a directory with a file with a space in it? a newline? a file called '-rf'?"), to say nothing of whether the next person working on the script will know what all the fancy operations do. And I've got a decent-sized collection of 5-line bash scripts lying around doing various things. I just don't let them get much longer.

One of the most useful things to do is just load up an index in your head of what bash can do, then know you can look it up if you ever want it.

(Substitute your choice of shell for bash throughout.)

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