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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?

#321

Post by shaftway »

marcosdumay wrote: post #246
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…

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.

It's not so much existing at the fringe of performance, but there have been weeks of my life lost to needing to tune a query or an index. Sure, some of that time is actually building the index I just added. But I don't want to have to figure out a query plan.

If I'm building a simple CRUD app, then I don't need the complexity that SQL provides. If I'm building something bigger, then I probably need to think about the query plans.

I would have loved a tool that I could hand a proposed schema, estimates of the data, and some SQL I want to run that would come back and tell me "That's stupid, because you're doing a join on computed data; add this index, denormalize this field, and remove this clause from your query." but I'm also realistic enough to know that such a tool isn't plausible.

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

#322

Post by shaftway »

tyingq wrote: post #141
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…

Surely there's a relational DB somewhere...perhaps indirectly via Saas? Maybe payroll, company books, timesheets, or some other software common to most businesses.

Oh, I'm sure there is. I'm also sure I have zero idea how to access it, request one, or who to even start talking to about it.

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

#323

Post by danso »

geebee wrote: post #304
ams6110 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IF you start to think in a set orientation, SQL makes a lot more sense. If you try to think procedurally you will struggle with SQL.

That's interesting. I didn't learn SQL until taking a course on it in grad school. I had some programming background, mainly from math classes and a bit of CS. the concept of a query really seemed odd, it took some mental adjusting. My only programming background was largely in writing procedural code. My brain really wanted to think in terms of methods, functions, inputs, and return values. It's been so long (18 yea…

I was in a similar boat. I studied computer engineering in school but didn't take any database course. My first encounter with SQL was years later as an education reporter. Someone in the newsroom threw out a "Access 97 for Dummies" and I picked it up and realized it was just what I needed to do the kind of analysis I wanted on California schools and test scores (CA.gov is quite good about posting raw data [0])

I eventually moved from Access to MySQL/SQLite, but if it weren't for Access's interactive query designer, where the tables are presented as lists of columns and you draw/drag lines to declare a JOIN between columns [1], I honestly don't think I would have ever grokked SQL.

I actually think that without SQL, I would have never understood the power and purpose of a JOIN, even though that concept of comparing lists is the foundation of most investigative research. So I justify forcing SQL on to journalism students not merely because it's a useful skill, but because it presents the best vocabulary and grammar for describing the idea of joins.

Also, SQL's general lack of data-munging functions or conveniences really drives home that data is just characters and numbers, and doesn't magically have meaning or come into existence. That is an extremely difficult concept to convey with Excel -- e.g. how it automagically converts `9-11` into `11-Sep` and confers a datetime context onto what was just plaintext.

[0] http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/dd/

[1] http://www.opengatesw.net/ms-access-tutorials/Access-Article...

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

#324

Post by ianmcgowan »

franze wrote: post #236
ianmcgowan wrote: post #150

I still get paid to program in Pick Basic ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system ) which seems kind of unreal in 2017.

Whatfor?

Line of business application for leasing companies.

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

#325

Post by pjmlp »

kej wrote: post #279
pjmlp wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi and C++ Builder downfall sadly started when Borland went greedy and started to scare customers with their lack of business focus, specially the spin off.

I think their biggest mistake was trying to follow Microsoft into .Net instead of taking over the native desktop development niche. A native Delphi 8 with some VB6 import tools would have done wonders for them.

Don't agree.

Their biggest mistakes were focusing on enterprise life cycle tools, selling the developer tools unit, creating an half hearted port of Delphi to GNU/Linux based on WINE, letting all the key developers leave the company.

All these together created the image that most of us should leave Delphi and C++ Builder while it was still affordable to do so.

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

#326

Post by IslaDeEncanta »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #148
IslaDeEncanta wrote: post #89

Perl 5. Perl is awesome and versatile, and it's the fastest scripting language in common usage.

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

Perl is faster in the benchmarks I've seen, although it's difficult to really measure most real world use.

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

#327

Post by Buttons840 »

reikonomusha wrote: post #209

Many folks have said it here but I'll say it again: Common Lisp. 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 o…

You mention several benefits, how many of those do you feel apply to all "lispy" languages, and how many are specific to Common Lisp [in your opinion]?

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

#328

Post by squeaky-clean »

shanemhansen wrote: post #46
ptaipale wrote: 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…

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

Seriously! I learned so much about scripting and networks in my high school programming classes because a group of us just wanted to play Quake 3 and CS 1.6 instead of doing assignments, and we needed to get around whatever software they had in place to monitor whether you were slacking off.

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

#330

Post by j45 »

campusman wrote: post #100

ColdFusion/CFML. All day, every day. Although a heavy dose of the newer hotness and the eventual migration of everything I work with off of it is in the works. Still enjoy working with it though. Very productive.

A lot of what's being built today as "web first languages" has existed for a long time in ColdFusion already for over 20 years.

ECMAscript style coding support that unlocked the underlying JVM in its entirety is one of those things.

It was one of the first, and only languages and platforms that was made for the web first, instead of extending non-web language to the web with a framework.

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