Do you program in any of the "less popular" languages? (multiple choices allowed)

[KevinHall]

Please post specific language if you choose "other"

[TheCPUWizard]

Cobol and Fortran are still alive....
Pascal/Delphi on a regular basis....

[Yves M]

I would argue that writing in assembler is less popular today, but I still (sometimes) do it.

Apart from that, none of the others.

[Andreas Masur]

Well...I play around a little bit with Objective-C (on my MAC) as well as with SmallTalk in my spare time (which has decreased to zero at the moment). Other than that...I even do not know some of the mentioned language...

[Doctor Luz]

If old BASIC can be called "less popular", yes, the last week I found an old code in BASIC which I must translate. Fortunately it was not very long.

[ADSOFT]

Clarion for windows.



Very RAD tool!!!


I like C++, very dissapointed that C# is taking over. .... might change my mind when I start using in on regular basis. I'm still swamped with MFC, VB, and Clarion projects: Still have some projects in "c" too.


I have heard good things about WINFORMS (C#), but since I do a lot of hardware design, I don't think I can get away from C++ like strictly APP designers will be able to do.

In terms of writing UNMANAGED WINDOWS code MFC is probobly still the most efficient???

[Kheun]

Other than touching different favours of old Basic and Pascal long time ago, I have not been using any other less popular language. Well, I guess it about time for me to start playing with Eiffel, Ada, etc.

[dimm_coder]

Ruby.
I can't say that I'm familiar with it, though.
It's considered a true object-oriented language. It has some interesting features: powerful and flexible iterators,embedded support for regular expresions, ability to extend the classes of the standard libraries and much more.
Well, and its original author is Japanese
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

[jono]

ive written one, two or three LISP interpreters in C/C++. the LISP syntax requires a simple easy to understand recursive descent parser. theres nothing like writing such a thing to reveal the underlying power & beauty of the LISP concept. a good read is http://www.cs.umbc.edu/331/resources...on-of-Lisp.pdf . LISP syntax also maps transparently onto the nested structure of markup languages like XML.

XLisp & several programs based on it, such as XLisp-Stat, & other programs w/ LISP extensions, such as emacs, the GIMP & Nyquist have proved their worth over & over & demonstrate the lasting utility of the language.

LISP is also famous as a src of programming innovations, including guis (windows & a pointer device), objects, exception handling, SQL, runtime type information, & so on. some standard lisp features, such as lambdas and continuations, are only just now being recognized for the pwerful techniques they are, & being implimented in other languages. LISPs use in search problems, graph unification, natural language, online gaming & other AI techniques is legendary..

the amusing thing is that LISP has been around since 1957. and still the best. every CS major shld be introduced to LISP, & LISPers shld have automatic entry to all the worlds most exclusive nitespots.

another language i think is pretty, elegant & swell is PostScript, which is basically a cross between LISP and Forth, & designed to be embedded (much like the ill conceived & over loved Java).

third & final underappreciated language? Prolog.
:-)

[farqureshi]

If other means "The Others"

Anyway, I mostly program in C/C++ (gcc and VC++), Visual Basic and sometime in NASM. But I still use Visual FoxPro (and FoxPro for DOS when target user have only DOS). I always wonder if VFP is dead or has very low coder base than VB then why Microsoft still working on it? I heard they annouce Beta for VFP9.

Whatever, VFP is still much faster than VB with Access Database at backend. Furthermore, you can write SQL commands in VFP just like any other commands of VFP (what else a database coder needed? ) I prefer VFP as a frontend for Oracle and MSSQL Servers. Even it can do frontend for MySQL too (if you are not using PHP).

Bye for now.

[Yves M]

Originally posted by jono
third & final underappreciated language? Prolog.
:-)

Very true, since I don't like it

A few subjective opions:

• Prolog:
  I've programmed quite a bit in Prolog at University (AI, NLP etc.) but never appreciated it. To truly get the most out of it, you must know how it will get executed and this sort of defeats the point (for me) of a higher level language. Moreover it's hard
• Miranda, Haskell
  I rather like functional languages like Miranda and Haskell but unfortunately there is not much demand for them.
• Perl
  It's very nice and powerful but has an awful syntax. The regular expressions are great, the handling of lists is OK, but some (theoretically easy) stuff gets very complex.
• Pascal/Delphi
  Nice, but then again it's not much different from C/C++ in terms of syntax. It's a pity that the OO features are a bit limited and that there is nothing like templates.
• Java
  Not a big fan, although it arguably has some nice features like garbage collection. In my view it's a C++ light with a bigger standard library.
• Visual Basic
  It's a pain. Some stuff is very easy and other stuff is unnecessarily complicated. Try sorting an array in VB and you'll see what I mean.
• C
  It's a language that should only really be used by experts. Recent compilers are better at warning you about potential problems, but the scope for mistakes is big. However the syntax is nice and clean for most stuff.
• C++
  Templates are the best thing since sliced bread Abstract Datastructures can be implemented cleanly and efficiently while remaining quite generic. The drawback is the steep and long learning curve.
• Whitespace
  Clean, visually appealing language, but ultimately too hard to program in. Moreover it's hard to follow the workings of an algorithm just by looking at it.
• SQL
  Can be extremely powerful, but also somehwhat daunting. It's a pity that comparable queries don't perform comparably on different systems. This limits SQL's real power.

Note that of the above, I use C/C++, VB, SQL and a little bit of Perl regularly.

[dimm_coder]

Originally posted by Yves M
Prolog:
I've programmed quite a bit in Prolog at University (AI, NLP etc.) but never appreciated it. To truly get the most out of it, you must know how it will get executed and this sort of defeats the point (for me) of a higher level language. Moreover it's hard

I've programmed in Prolog at University too, but for me it was quite enjoyable

[cloureir]

Visual Foxpro too
and
Centura Builder (SAL Language), anyone heard about it?

[jono]

folloing that pean to lisp i shld add,, the languages i use every day are...

........(69%) C++
........(15%) C
........(10%) Python
........(5%) LISP
........(1%) evrything else

lol.


re: Prolog, i think the difficul;ty of learning & understanding a language is less relevant than its expressive power & ease of maintainence. this is the reverse of the actual way most software shops select & use languages.

the thorniest aspects of many real world software problems are in ensuring logical consistency. these problems are nicely addressed by constraint satisfaction & other techniques which are explicit in prolog.

unfortunately, most people use Java, C++ or (ugh) VB, & never really question, let alone verify, the logical structure of their program until forced to by bugs.

i have a theory, which i try to practice, that different languages are best for different things, and the secret is to modularize software in such a way that the best tool can be used for the job.

i always try to make a gui module completely independent of processing & other logic. sometimes i might use mfc and put a dialog box or mdi frame in a dll. sometimes i might write an extension for Python using C++ & call it from a wxWindows gui. most of the time i'll use a console if i can get away w/ it.

if i was using Prolog, which i wld like to butt... i wld use this approach, & link it in or call from it. Thats what i do w/ LISP. well, w/ my own lispy scheme type thing which i call terp.

C is great becos you can use it instead of assembler for uC programming, & i once used VB to pick my nose, until i discovered my finger.

hehehehe

[Yves M]

Originally posted by dimm_coder
I've programmed in Prolog at University too, but for me it was quite enjoyable

Yeah well, I didn't get to like it :/

The thing is that a lot of research in my field (NLP) is done with Prolog. It's a bit useful as a prototyping language but can't really be used in production software. Since the idiom of Prolog is so far from an iterative language like C++, you have to re-design the algorithms anyways to get the most out of them. It takes more code but in the end it's faster and more scalable.