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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?

#431

Post by bluetwo »

maxxxxx wrote: post #249
danso wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. I'm surprised at the negative thoughts about SQL. I didn't realize I was an outlier.

I'm grateful that it doesn't look like other languages. The format it uses is really easy to generate using other languages, which makes it really useful in a lot of what I do.

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

#432

Post by mercurialuser »

charlieflowers wrote: post #377
mercurialuser wrote: post #356

I will use Clipper open source alternative called Harbour. I started using Clipper in 1986 and some of 1986 code still runs today. Clipper was a compiler for Ashton tate dbase II language. Harbour now allows to run old code on windows, linux, Mac, Solaris and a bunch of other less common OSes, both in text mode or using some gui lib. It will also run on android and ios (using Qt).

Wow! I had no idea Clipper was still around. I was using it in 1993 with code blocks (essentially lambdas and first class functions, but not closures).

Yes it is still thriving in some countries. Every month someone asks how to run old clipper programs in some more recent os and porting (if you have source code or exes can be decompiled) can be done quite easily. If you still have clipper code you can give Harbour a try (it is on github).

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

#433

Post by gscott »

dsp1234 wrote: post #30

Active Server Pages (aka classic asp) VBScript JScript

Everyone complains about Asp Classic but as long as I am working on my own code it all works great. I write everything in asp classic about to re-launch a modernized version of my groupware system with a re-design of the display but all of the page logic is all the same.

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

#434

Post by bluetwo »

vrisha wrote: post #252
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.

Seems only two of us here.

And another here.

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

#435

Post by LeoPanthera »

voltagex_ wrote: post #401
LeoPanthera wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not proud of it (and I'm not going to share the code) but I wrote a CMS for a medium-traffic site entirely in bash and standard unix tools like awk/grep. It should be an absolute clusterfuck but it's been surprisingly reliable and performant, to the point where I have no desire to replace it.

If you can't show the code, can you give any info about the overall design of it? I can't even think how you'd structure a "large" application in shell scripts.

It runs as a cgi, and uses files on disk instead of a database.

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

#436

Post by stevekemp »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #93
mfontani wrote: post #64

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?

I use it for command-line utilities, such as static-site-compiler, a blog-compiler, and similar.

Beyond that I use it for microservices, implement REST-APIs, and also for powering whole sites. With the right framework/modules you can do almost anything.

For example I re-implemented the API my home lights use to communicate, allowing me to use cron to turn off lights via the perl interface.

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

#437

Post by stevekemp »

dice wrote: post #300
mfrager wrote: post #200

Perl. A language that is still ahead of its time. I have a system for building RPMs of CPAN modules and their dependencies automatically.

>I have a system for building RPMs of CPAN modules and their dependencies automatically. I would be interested in this: is it open source?

It shouldn't be too hard to write that, I know on Debian systems it is trivially easy to package CPAN modules as Debian packages, via dh-make-perl.

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

#439

Post by asab »

copperx wrote: post #409
nonsince wrote: post #142

- C! (I'm not using it at my current job but I'm just about to start a new job that's mostly C) - Scheme! (Because I love it) - Bash/Awk/Perl/Sed! (Because I use Arch for everything) - Java! (Because you can't have everything in life)

I was about to google C!, literally. By the way, if C# is pronounced C-sharp, I wonder how C! would be pronounced ...

'see bang'

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

#440

Post by nice_byte »

noonespecial wrote: post #7

Pascal/Delphi Before there was an internet of lightbulbs and smoke detectors, there was an internet of industrial process things. And they used windows 2000 and Delphi. They still do.

I like Delphi. I used to play a lot with both Dephi 7 and VB 6 back when I was in high school. The nice thing about both of them was that they made GUI programming really easy, but Pascal was just a nicer language.
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