Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#1

Post by smlckz » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 2:55 AM UTC

And what's your experience of using such “old” programming language(s)?

Here “use” can mean writing new code, debugging/maintaing old code etc.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#2

Post by Bostonian » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 3:06 AM UTC

Through 2015 I used Fortran to develop trading strategies for a fund, and since then I have developed strategies for my personal account. I used to use g95 and now use the gfortran compiler. Fortran 90 and later versions (the latest standard is F2018) have modern features, including array operations like Matlab or NumPy. For plotting I wrote some subroutines that called gnuplot. Fortran does not have libraries to download financial data like Python or R, but once you have the data, coding is straightforward and the programs are fast.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#3

Post by the_only_law » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 3:43 AM UTC

VBA, VBScript, VB6, VB.NET

Maybe not “old” but most of those are solid legacy.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#4

Post by 1680168l » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 4:45 AM UTC

the_only_law wrote: post #3

VBA, VBScript, VB6, VB.NET Maybe not “old” but most of those are solid legacy.

Ouch. Would hate to have to use VBA at the day job.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#5

Post by TheRealKing » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 5:03 AM UTC

Fortran is quite heavily used in computational science domain. Both the "old" (F66, F77, F90) and the new modern F2003, F2008, F2018. and Yes, (modern) Fortran feeds my family daily (along with many other computational tools and skills). Modern Fortran is a bliss. The parallel features of it are quite advanced comparable to advanced modern MPI capabilities, yet with an extremely intuitive and simple "Coarray" syntax. It is a fully vectorized, parallel shared and distributed, array-oriented, also Object-Oriented, language. It has influenced and shaped the syntax of MATLAB, Python, R, even C++ numerical libraries by its simple powerful high-level array-syntax.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#6

Post by mbfg » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 6:25 AM UTC

Aren't almost all of them old at this point? The numbers of people using what most people would count as new is pretty small percentage wise.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#7

Post by fiftyacorn » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 6:54 AM UTC

TheRealKing wrote: post #5

Fortran is quite heavily used in computational science domain. Both the "old" (F66, F77, F90) and the new modern F2003, F2008, F2018. and Yes, (modern) Fortran feeds my family daily (along with many other computational tools and skills). Modern Fortran is a bliss. The parallel features of it are quite advanced comparable to advanced modern MPI capabilities, yet with an extremely intuitive and simple "Coarray" syntax.…

It's still heavily used in the chemical industry too

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#8

Post by yen223 » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 7:18 AM UTC

SQL, hands down

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#9

Post by jstx1 » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 7:34 AM UTC

mbfg wrote: post #6

Aren't almost all of them old at this point? The numbers of people using what most people would count as new is pretty small percentage wise.

Even the newer ones aren't that new - Rust, Go, Kotlin, Julia are over 10 years old at this point. TypeScript is 8.

Re: Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

#10

Post by thorin » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 8:24 AM UTC

SQL, Oracle PL/SQL, bash/ksh

Previous jobs, not so long ago: Fortran, C, BASIC