Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 502 posts

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

#411

Post by ryandrake »

ereyes01 wrote: post #403
randomthrowr88 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ra…

Search for companies that need to design sophisticated hardware at very low cost. This pretty much guarantees they need to hack microcontrollers, which are usually programmed in C. One I've worked with in my past life as an embedded developer is TI MSP430 (costs pennies), but there's many others. Another route to code in C close to the hardware is to find work writing Linux kernel device drivers. Of course, you have…

+1 for device driver writing. That's how I got my start over a decade ago.

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

#412

Post by throwaway1236 »

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…

Are there resources you'd recommend for finding jobs in CL ?

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

#413

Post by lgessler »

kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #11
lgessler wrote: post #9

MUMPS. Despite its strong resemblance to compiler IR and lack of a type system, it is the standard DB in Health IT in America.

I'm going to take a wild guess - EPIC?

Heh, of course the Madisonian would figure it out :)

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

#415

Post by fotbr »

Java and C#, with a bit of (MS)SQL and ASP.NET and a smattering of VBA and ASP at work. None are what I would consider "old".

For fun, though, there's QB64's implementation of QuickBasic. I also have my old 8088 up and running again, and GW-Basic and ASM there. I started with GW-Basic when I was about 4 years old on that old 8088. Two 5.25" drives, no HD, 640k RAM and a "Turbo" button. What's not to like?

Co-worker introduced me to Lazarus / FreePascal a few weeks ago, and I decided to dust off my old pascal book from jr. high school and see what I can remember.

If I can find a use for it, I'd like to dust off and freshen up my Fortran77 memory. I know there have been updates, but Fortran77 has a little special place in my memory since that was the first language I got paid to know.

Then there's COBOL. No idea why, but I want to revisit it and see if it is as bad as I remember.

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

#416

Post by wernercd »

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/

I'd add Typewriting. Not having to look at the keybaord (including my DAS Keybaord with no key markings) has made life sooooo much easier.

QBasic was nice, but no-where near as all-encompassing as touch-typing.

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

#417

Post by jslabovitz »

Ruby. Not Ruby+Rails, just pure Ruby. If you take away the Rails ecosystem, Ruby starts to feel like an old (but lovely) language. Many non-Rails gems (libraries) haven't been updated for at least five years, if not ten -- so I end up rewriting a lot of stuff myself. I enjoy it, actually. Quite peaceful.

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

#418

Post by ytjohn »

m_fayer wrote: post #386
weavie wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think I hated SQL until I decided I had had enough of it and I tried to do a project using a no-sql database. Suddenly everything became a lot harder and I was having to write massive amounts of code to do the things that could be done with a few lines of SQL. Even the simplest of tasks just sucked the life out of me. I soon ported the project over to use Postgres and decided that actually SQL is awesome.

I know exactly what you mean. I've realised that when you're solving a hard problem (complex data logic, extreme performance requirements) with SQL, you end up systematically experimenting and thinking very deeply within a rigidly defined system. With no-sql databases, you're monkeying with obscure APIs that cover up obscure, idiosyncratic, and hard-to-reason about database engines, and patching strange behavior with…

Then you learn about hstore and json store in postgresql and you realize it's the best of both worlds.

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

#419

Post by Cieplak »

computerphage wrote: post #251
alfalfasprout wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hands down the best thing about C++ for me is that with modern C++ you can write relatively safe clean code while taking advantage of decades of robust libraries. Yeah, Rust is a big step forward in some respects, but it'll be almost a decade before we see it catch up to C++'s incredible ecosystem. C++ is almost the lingua franca of finance, for instance.

Rust can already take advantage of the C ecosystem quite easily. Rust/C++ usability is a major goal for 2017. I'm hoping that by year end you can have the best of both worlds. The advantages of Rust for new code and the mountain of code that exists for C and for C++.

C++ FFI will likely be difficult given that unlike C, C++ lacks a stable ABI since the standard doesn't define an ABI, and leaves it up to compilers to implement.

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

#420

Post by salomon812 »

I'll be using QBasic to teach my kids programming. They both got Raspberry Pis for Christmas, which I preloaded with DosBox. This was always Plan A, but this article made me stop looking for a Plan B: http://www.nicolasbize.com/blog/30-years-later-qbasic-is-sti...
Post reply on HN