Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

I couldn't think of a better word than 'unfashionable' but what I mean by this is a programming language that is not new, upcoming, or has much traction.

The language may have unique or novel features, it may be a language with a passionate and dedicated band of programmers. But one thing the language does not have is much 'mindshare' amongst programmers: its time in the spotlight has passed. It may still be in active development, or it may be moribund.

Examples of 'unfashionable' languages include: Cobol, Snobol, Icon, Unicon, Forth, Pascal, Eiffel, D, Smalltalk, Basic etc.(Note, I realize this is subjective to a degree.)

If you use an 'unfashionable' language, what keeps you using it? It is a unique feature? Is it familiarity or comfort? Is it speed or performance or some other quality? What do you think we could learn from that language when developing programming languages today?

I use Delphi. The RAD Studio IDE is super featured and it's really easy to create interfaces. A nice feature is that the programs produced contain all dependencies so nothing else needs to be installed when distributing.

Most of my web programming these days is in PHP. It gets the job done, it's easy to use and deploy, and I don't need anything more for the scale and complexity of what I'm doing. It's been around for a long time and doesn't seem to have a risk of going away anytime soon.

SQL databases. All of the above applies. Stored procedures when the database supports them. I do not use an ORM.

I try to use command-line utilites whenever I need to manipulate data. sed, awk, grep, etc. I rarely need to drop into a scripting language for these tasks.

There's a huge difference between languages that are no longer fashionable, call them old-fashioned, and languages that never had wide following, if any, call them niche languages. Most of the languages you mention were never mainstream production languages, for good reasons.