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

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 on custom-designed boards, for example). In every single case, we had no additional trouble hiring a Lisp or Lisp-capable programmer as compared to hiring for any other language, including Python. (In fact, Python was more difficult to hire for because the market is saturated with beginners who claim expertise.)

Lisp is one of those languages where the ratio of long-term benefits and productivity vs. good initial impressions is at a record high. It doesn't look like C or Python or JS, with all the parentheses, so people brush it off.

Lisp isn't the pinnacle of every great idea to come about in computer science and software engineering, but it is one of the most robust, macroscopically well designed, and most productive languages for translating arbitrary abstract ideas into maintainable, production code. Even if it doesn't look initially very pretty in the eyes of a career Python programmer.

Doesn't that imply an over-supply?

I did my grad research on a highly specialized topic, involving plenty of math/physics.

Then I worked in industry applying my skills for 4 years.

Then I switched to programming - nothing related to my engineering degrees. This job requires only a BS (and not really that - one of my coworkers has no degree).

The highly specialized job was the one where I had little leverage, lower pay, and a miserable experience. Why? Fewer jobs than supply.

Whereas for programming, the supply is much larger than for the specialized work, but the demand is even larger than the supply.

The geek in me yearns for a job where I can go back to numerical algorithms and physics. But frankly, those jobs tend to suck when you don't have much leverage.

With that said, though, and especially with huge companies like Google using Python as one of their main languages, the supply of qualified Python programmers is no doubt larger than that of Lisp. But, it's a fallacy to believe that the supply of qualified programmers correlates inversely to the time spent searching for them. It's sometimes easier to find needles that standout in the haystack.

As for software jobs in the domain of math/physics/etc., they're out there, but just harder to seek out. The world hasn't run out of hard science problems to solve, and many companies would go to great lengths to hire brilliant individuals who have both scientific acumen and programming skills.

There are fewer pure research positions, and unless you are very good there is a leverage problem there because every year dozens of new grads come looking for essentially that job. Something to bear in mind if your desire is primarily to work in matlab/python/R on things that look a bit like your thesis did.

- 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 processing information in ways that involve a lot of repetition and manularity. Scripting solves those things.

(For some things also Excel and VB perhaps counts as an "old" programming language; it is also often quite useful. And I probably will end up doing something in C again this year.)

Then when I was 22, after a good computer science education, my first job was working at EA, and the build system involved a bunch of batch files. That knowledge from nearly a decade before came in handy! The CS stuff didn't come up until later.

Later on, wasting time reading NNTP news at the uni was also actually a good investment for learning the language in a way that is useful at work.

For my kids, the games have again been the same thing, along with Harry Potter books.

I myself have found out that during meetings I prefer to use a pen and paper but it is mostly just notes that I take for myself.

The trello part is more recent, but I have notebooks going back to my first internship in 2012(which I know isn't that long for most here). It's pretty interesting to see old notes I took and the problems I had at the time.

But in a classic meme sense: "It isn't you I hate SQL, it's what I have to think about when I use you." I don't want to spend my time thinking about database indexes, query plans, or other complicated bits. I just want to get my data out.

Sometimes I struggle, and I'd give anything for a plain inner join, but on the whole I like this tradeoff.

What do you find simpler in terms of data querying and management?

Pandas is an excellent contribution to data analysis, but I gotta tell you, I was absolutely delighted to learn about pandasql and realize I could write selects, group by, order by, and so forth, converting data frame to data frame through sql.

What can I say? I truly encourage people to give SQL a real chance. I'm happy to use ORMs that save me some typing on simple queries, and certainly I use a combination of pandas and sql, there are some things much better accomplished through a programming language. But I'm willing to drop to SQL pretty quickly if I sense that the programming language or library is really just forcing me to re-learn a new implementation of sql.

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.

> It isn't you I hate SQL, it's what I have to think about when I use you.

Do you live at the fringe of performance like that? Nobody spends much time thinking about those things, and the few times that require thinking about them would require thinking about much more complicated things if you weren't using a database.

If you limit yourself to using the STL with C++11 stuff but don't go crazy with inheritance and templating in your classes it can be nice

In my case I have an embedded system with a touch screen display, running a bunch of tasks to drive peripherals. There is a task that handles communication with the touch screen (serial). Then there is a set of slow tasks that handles states and modes, for example the runtime representation of a modulator or an RF amplifier. This got extended because we are adding "remote control" support over RS-232 and USB and so this runtime representation has to support more of a multiple model-view-controller. This can be done with queues and a lot of functions but it was simpler to represent it as a tree of stateful values that can be updated via remote commands or via the touch screen and have "downstream" updates. So that's what I mean by the "business logic" -- higher-level than, say, a driver and task for talking to a digital potentiometer or a DAC.

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.

It first appeared in 1984 and the ANSI specification was finished in 1994, but it traces its lineage directly back to Lisp 1.5 from 1962. It can run Lisp sources decades older than it trivially.

It is a very practical, multi-paradigm language with high quality, high performance implementations on many platforms.

Its main issue is that it is not very popular, but that might also be a blessing.

Implementing something like modem initialization - "Send AT command to modem/wait for a reply matching one of several patterns or a timeout/handle result/rinse, lather, repeat until done" - is quite trivial to do with expect.

It's not something I use every day, but it's one of those useful things to keep in your mental toolbox.

assembler (various) (I've even learned x86_64 well after being a RISC aficionado, it's actually kinda neat)

sed

bash

LaTex

I used to use YACC/LEX but that's been replaced with ANTLR for awhile now.

What language am I starting to use? Rust and R.

I wrote something in PERL once but when I woke up the next day I couldn't really read it. So that was that.

I'm in the process of "inheriting" a company whose sole product is a multi million LOC behemoth written in Delphi. The product itself is a highly customizeble/parametrizeable control software for business processes/alarm management build around a rule engine for rules drawn in a graphic editor.

On the plus side, Delphi is quite easy to read. I got started with no prior knowledge in Delphi or Pascal, and I was able to roughly understand significant parts of the application within a few days.

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.

Spent a while writing and modifying Delphi apps there, I really enjoyed it. I'm actually surprised it isn't used more today, it was definitely "rapid development" at the time.

One thing it was great for was making small, dependency free executables. Similar to today's concept of "Microservices" we often wrote small executable services and applications for tasks and it was very straightforward and simple. You could whip something up in a couple hours that accomplished a lot. Push the .exe file somewhere, add it into the process and forget about it.

Not surprised people are still out there using this stuff.

On the other side, I don't think that Delphi/Pascal is dead and I am starting new project this month: control software for laboratory equipment. I can't find any other tool that will let me create multiplatform desktop software that interface directly with hardware. This new software will be written in Lazarus instead of Delphi.

Hahaha. That was good.

Delphi is used heavily at my company to process millions of transactions a day, in the credit card industry.

I myself am a C# developer though. But I respect Delphi's performance and relatively clean syntax.

Now we kind of got .NET Native, but it still isn't 100% done.

My only problem is that I have to maintain legacy codebases without OOP code.

I really like Delphi actually. It's a shame Embarcadero doesn't really seem to care about it.

But, and I asked during the webcasts, who's going to buy into a new project now?

For myself I have a couple of old D7 apps for clients that have been running for a decade now.

Here's a couple of machines that others have built:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTSAiF9AHN4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_u3hpYMySk

Also, some work in MPASM (Assembly for the Microchip PIC series of microcontrollers - same reason)

Edit: I am not sure just when S5 got introduced, but I've got installation media - on 5.25" floppies - for CP/M in my office. Made in West Germany.

That old.

Luckily, the IDE has also been ported to more contemporary operating systems.

Secretly, it's just fortran all the way down, and LaTeX for document preparation.

Piled on top of that is a fair amount of matlab, simulink, and python.

Java is in the same boat, but at least it's still marketable so engineers don't mind working with it as much.

They told a story of a guy who failed the cultural interview because he told a VP "you can't write a large web app in perl", and of course they had done just that. With the reflection of hind sight I think despite the obvious empirical counter factual, he was on to something. It really was an uphill battle against the language to do things large scale.

But when you work in a big team and make something complex, you want something that's consistent. All of that permissiveness and flexibility bites you.

Now, with good styling guides and linting, you can make it work for complex software with a big team, but that's culturally pretty anti-perl. We're trying to do that with Javascript now, which isn't as weird as perl, but has many of the same excesses that you want to reign in with a style guide.

Also, m4. I use it together with awk and bmake for a couple websites. I plan to port awk scripts to sth. else though, I keep forgetting awk.

I expect it to stay around a good, decent while :)

Those aren't old enough to count, I guess

googles age of PHP

Holy crap! PHP is almost 23 years old. Probably still not considered "old" though...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

I make web apps and started using Perl for cgi scripts back in `97 and still use it. Most of my app code now runs on the client side with Javascript so I don't do much with perl anymore but I still use it for most everything on the backend.

Learning to code something with new or different languages is not something I do without good cause and/or necessity. I haven't ran into that much building web apps.

I suspect I may have the only B compiler in the world for the VideoCore IV processor.

It's an awesome language and both the language and the ecosystem is getting better and better all the time

Also, I have written a couple of reporting scripts to watch over our Active Directory (look for computers that do not exist any more but still have their AD accounts, stuff like that).

Oh yeah, and a couple of Nagios plugins, too.

For these tasks, there are not many languages that can match Perl in versatility and productivity. It's not the prettiest language, but it's extremely useful.

It's possible I will start to write C++ also.

This is not actually a joke comment -- it teaches assembly language programming. Not 6502 specifically, but the fake architecture looks a lot like 6502. You work up through a set of more and more challenging assignments until you have to write a sort. I really enjoyed it and would consider it a great introduction to basically any assembly language.

Also, I guess writing code in Python 2 is considered outdated nowadays, so that too. Plus the usual shell scripting (bash on Linux and simple batch files on Windows).

I do hope to avoid writing any new Fortran this year, so there's that. Some of the less performance critical code will instead involve Julia, and I've been experimenting with D and Rust for fun. Not sure which category Java and C# fit in, but in all probability I'll also use those at some point.

And finally, LaTeX. Very old and, unfortunately, indispensable.

Python for when someone needs me to work on Django, and also for helping my younger daughter learn programming, because it's a pretty accessible place to start.

C when I need to be that close to the machine and there's some reason not to use Lisp.

Ruby, age 21. Web development, some text processing scripts. Design started on February 24, 1993 first release on December 21, 1995. [1]

Python, age 25, almost 26. Web development. Implementation started in December 1989. First release on February 1991. [2]

JavaScript, age 21. Web development. Designed and released in May 1995. [3] However if Ruby and Python are clearly the same languages they were 20+ years ago plus the natural evolutions, I don't know if the JavaScript we're using today has anything more that a resemblance with what it was back in 1995. After all we say we're using bash (Bourne Again SHell, it couldn't be more explicit) and not sh, speaking of which:

Bash, age 27. Scripting. Coding started on January 10, 1988 and released on June 8, 1989 [4] If we count the Bourne shell, that is from 1977 (age 39), coding started in 1976 [5]

Erlang, age 28. First prototypes running in 1988, work on BEAM started in 1992, in production as we know it in 1998 [6] Actually I'll be using Elixir for backend coding. Sometimes all what an Elixir module does is calling Erlang modules so it's handy to code that directly in Erlang. The Elixir compiler handles compiling and linking Erlang well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)#Hi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

[3] https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_J...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#History

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_shell

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#...

Considering that PHP, Java, C++, Perl are also in their 20s (and Objective-C is 30+), should we really call them old languages or old should that be reserved to something dating back to the 70s or the 60s? (C, COBOL, Fortran).

I would like to replace it very much, because I don't like Perl 5's type system very much (and something like Moose is overkill, IMHO, for a 500-line-script).

But it's just so damn useful, and most of the time I can get something to work faster than with Python or Go. So I might not love Perl, but you could say I respect it very much.

Though I don't consider Fortran "old" as it has many shiny features.

I develop mainframe software.

- sh/awk/sed (I don't really think of these as separate languages): mainly for scripting things that aren't worth firing up python for or that are easier to script this way

- javascript: for web front ends

- html/css: ditto

- possibly c: for particular things where I need more speed/control over memory than python can provide

When embedded into a C host applications, it is really nice, though. There is also a port of Lua 5.2 to Go, which has a slighty confusing API (to me, at least), but the documentation makes up for that.

powershell (11 years) - basically just a better version of bash with 'select' and 'where' replacing scraping for text with grep/sed/awk

javascript (21 years) - finally ES5 and 6 have added some stupidly obvious things like multiline strings, array.includes(), destructuring, etc - it's actually a pretty good language now.

It can be surprisingly fun to see if I can get something done in "pure" SQL without any procedural code.

I feel a little sorry for the poor soul who may one day inherit that code, but on the other hand, at least I write comments to explain why I do things in a certain way, which is more than my predecessor did.

Also, there is Lazarus which seems to be the FreePascal-alternative to Delphi. I took a look at it when inheriting a Delphi application at work, but it crashed on me a lot. Still, it's there.

purpose: sysadmin, automation, server-side programming, daemon, shell / interactive shell, command-line tools etc.

well ... it's not that old (cerca 2006) but it is considered dead LOL

I feel your pain. :-D

I had a contract doing C++/qt stuff 2015/2016. So I could conjure up my own reasons for and against. But I am curious about yours as I am largely ignorant of pascal.

And of course the usual Linux scripters: bash, awk, sed, etc.

Our COBOL comes from a software vendor, so rewriting it means waiting for them to decide that the cost of redeveloping decades of complex business logic in a new language/toolset outweighs the cost of supporting and enhancing these COBOL programs.

Fortunately it's a mostly read-only codebase. The number of times we've changed the COBOL code ourselves can probably be counted on one hand.

Edit: Well not all of it. I'm also learning rust and scheme in my free time.

Delphi - crossplatform development, tools

SQL - see above

C++/C# - tools

bash - scripting, mostly for managing servers

For my spare time work mostly Fortran, C and C++ qualify as old languages I'll be using. These I use to dabble in research (physics) more for fun than anything else.

Bash - I already know some Bash, but I want to become a bash guru.

I just enjoy cracking old Apple ][ games in my spare time, it's an incredibly rewarding challenge.

Generics came with C# 2.0 in November 2005 (12 years old)

LINQ came with C# 3.0 in November 2007 (9 years old)

We have a bunch of mission critical desktop application that run on Powerbuilder.

The oldest thing I periodically touch is VBA for Excel

- Python (esp. Django, which is for some reason uncool)

I also have this weird desire to jump back into C, just to refresh myself.

Ada for fun, though I'd say Ada 2012 is a bit like C++11 in terms of “basically a new language”. People do seem to have a perception of Ada as ‘old’, though I'm not sure why (it is, by my account, more ‘modern’ than, say, Go – actually, it's not unlike Go with a nice generics system).