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Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?
And what's your experience of using such “old” programming language(s)?
Here “use” can mean writing new code, debugging/maintaing old code etc.
- Bostonian 5y agoThrough 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.
- the_only_law 5y agoVBA, VBScript, VB6, VB.NET Maybe not “old” but most of those are solid legacy.
- TheRealKing 5y agoFortran 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.
- fiftyacorn 5y agoIt's still heavily used in the chemical industry too
- whinvik 5y agoI also use Fortran daily but I see more and more people/organizations try to move out of it. What language they move to remains to be seen, however the recent efforts to modernise Fortran, create a standard library may yet breathe new life into it.
- mbfg 5y agoAren'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.
- jstx1 5y agoEven the newer ones aren't that new - Rust, Go, Kotlin, Julia are over 10 years old at this point. TypeScript is 8.
- MH15 5y agoWhat's the newest -real- language do we think? Not just "gained popularity recently" but actually newer.
- mbfg 5y agoSwift might be the most important of the newest languages. Of course there's a new language every day, but swift has a significant user base and is still under 10.
- Jtsummers 5y agoThis depends on how we define a language. Ada 2012, for instance, is a significant update to Ada proper (better integrated support for design by contract, among other things). The next iteration (and its SPARK subset) is potentially closing some of the gap between Ada and Rust in the areas where Rust is presently "safer" (by some measure, here primarily memory safety) than Ada. C++20 versus C++98 (what I initially learned) is a very different language (or has the potential to be) thanks to its greatly expanded support for certain modes of programming that C++98 did not offer. But its differences with C++17 are a lot smaller, so they're more obviously "the same" language.
- yen223 5y agoSQL, hands down
- thorin 5y agoSQL, Oracle PL/SQL, bash/ksh Previous jobs, not so long ago: Fortran, C, BASIC
- lmiller1990 5y agoUntil recently wrote a lot of Perl 5 (still very popular in bioinfomatics).
- mindcrime 5y agoThe oldest stuff I use regularly at work would be Bash, Java, and Groovy. And then one specific utility stands out as something I use a lot, despite its age: sed. I use sed all over the place in scripts to inject values into config files as part of scripts.
- giantg2 5y agoThe usual stuff (SQL, ksh, etc) and COBOL.
- joshxyz 5y agoi honestly like batch and bash files haha
- ArtWomb 5y agoNot a language per se, but I'm on a Qt based distro this summer, and I was pleasantly surprised to see what's new in 6.0. Qt is ancient, ubiquitous. We use it everyday without realizing it. But now it's got its own IDE, UI editor. And supports a Vulkan rendering backend ;)
- jjice 5y agoMaybe I'll come off as a youngin' with this one, but PHP. I honestly really enjoy it. There are some quirks and syntax I don't particularly like, but overall, using PHP in a server setting isn't bad at all. I always heard people talk down on it in college, but those people probably never used it either. PHP by day and Rust by night is a nice combo honestly. Pretty different, but it gives some variety.
- mattmanser 5y agoIt used to be a really dodgy language, but I heard it's improved a lot. I've only ever fixed other people's PHP code or written small plugins for wordpress, so I can't give a good opinion, but a few people have told me I should give laravel a go over the years. One of the common complaints was that a lot of the core library had inconsistent function signatures[1], did they ever fix that? Always seemed to me that it would be an unfixable problem. [1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/32541/why-are-php-function-signatures-so-inconsistent https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3254...
- the_only_law 5y agoI’ve written PHP in the past. Frankly I don’t hate it much more than any other programming language that sees industrial use.
- jweather 5y ago.NET Compact Framework 3.5. Might not sound that old, but it's only supported in Visual Studio 2008. Microsoft keeps trying to kill it off, but the manufacturer I support is still shipping products using it.
- Multicomp 5y agoI work at a downstream customer of some company like yours. They like their windows mobile 6.5 devices very nicely, thank you very much. so when 2005 rugged wall-mounted tablet-with-barcode scanner or more commonly an RFID inventory scan gun dies, they just order another one, use MDM like Avalanche to give it its network policies and programs, and next shift grabs it and are off to the races. Using a rugged android phone is talked about and sat on, that's about it.
- dyingkneepad 5y agoC and Bash. I absolutely love and and hope to be able to continue using them long-term. Performance is key to what we do. Sometimes we even need to look at the code generated by the compiler, so some assembly knowledge is required too. (although sometimes I prefer C++, and learning Rust is still on my TODO list)