Posted on 04/06/2023 6:35:29 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
1. Java is the de facto enterprise standard. Having worked in some large enterprises, I know they are absolutely resistant to quick change and will keep Java for decades, like they did with COBOL. Java comes with enterprise and team features that other languages envy.
2. Javascript: depends on Web Assembly and transpilers. Even today, you can write in PHP and transpile in Javascript. It could become “the new JVM”, that is something that gets less used over time but everything use it as intermediate codebase. A big issue with Javascript is that if you exploit its strengths (ease of use, small code, available in browsers) you end in compatibility issues and you’ll need tools and more tools. I know I am in the minority thinking what I am about to say, but I think jQuery has been the most “Javascript soul” library ever created. What came next, are “frameworks” and “language improvements” that take out JS nature and make it another thing. Make it a “regular language”. Add burden and intermediate passages. Look at the ever growing tools chain needed to deploy what used to just require “Notepad” to code and run. Look at the verbose, “classic” newest JS syntax to declare classes etc. At this point we may as well use any regular language and transpile it to JS.
3. Python: it sort of failed to become “the general purpose language”. Paradoxically, I’ve seen more Go general purpose small apps in such a short Golang life time than Python. However Python has picked up the AI and finance analysis niches and is going to stay strong in them for many years to come.
4. C++: a staple for lots of lower level software, I always developed in C++ in two fashions: the “durable” and the “cool guy” way. The first, makes use of “moderate” C++ features and has stood the eras. The latter, using templates to the fullest, overloaded operators in the most extreme ways etc., is very neat and advanced but makes it hellish to maintain such codebase. By maintain I mean the 10 man years applications I had to upgrade and upkeep for years when I worked for large compaines. Whereas classes, inheritance etc don’t change much over the years, we had an hard time adapting templates and other stuff to (usually proprietary and barely standard) implementations for advanced constructs. Regular C: close to immortal. It’ll last until we’ll have such a grand technological revolution (quantum computers? Programmable DNA?) that C won’t be able to represent its basic structures any more.
5. C#: a totally cool and great programming language, but came late. Came late and for years it got imprisoned in the Microsoft ecosystem. We had mono and little else to work on C# outside of Windows. Add the fact you need a runtime and that the runtime has been really Windows oriented for years and you get a situation where a very nice language (I love it!) remained under-represented compared to its potential. I fear its usage will further decline in the future.
6. Kotlin: I feel it’s overhyped. True, it’s cool and “functional looking” so it’s 2018 fashion too. However it’s been developed by one small company and Google supported it because it was instrumental in their huge litigation with Oracle. Will it survive in the next years? Who knows.
7. Go: initially I dismissed it (despite its Google support!). Whereas I don’t see it as the “PHP / Java killer” some believe it to be, it has its uses. I haven’t done a lot with it, but have used and installed software made with it. It’s rich but still immature, especially when dealing with certain lower level O.S. (Linux is what I have seen) operations. I am not sure it’ll have everlasting success, but it’s here to stay for a while.
8. PHP: always mentioned last and shown like its only virtue is to show the others how something should not be done. PHP is not fashionable, it’s not “cool intellectual friendly”. It’s a workhorse, powering the large majority of the net since 20+ years. I love it. When developing large apps, it’s easier to keep backwards compatibility with PHP than in C++. It just works. Since version 7, it just works and fast. And cheap. If you want to ever work with overseas people, C and PHP (and Python in a lesser way) are the languages to go, period. If you want to create a website or an app that is compatible to African budgets, PHP is the answer. If you want to toy with TONS of stuff spanning from the eldest “C-like” functions a la “strpos()”, PHP does it. If you want to play with Interfaces, traits, contracts, behavioral and unit testing, iterators and maps, PHP does it. If you want to play with generators, fluent functions, lambdas, PHP does it. If you want to write a 1000 Java piece of code in 300 lines of code, PHP does it. Now with types hinting and strict checks “like a good language should do”. If you want to hack a 10 liner for a shell operation, PHP can do that. If you want to write a Fail2ban script, PHP can do that. If you want to develop an uber fast MVC backend, you can use Phalcon (C compiled speed). You could also achieve compiled speed by using HHVM but nowadays PHP 7.2 is so fast that it’s not really worth the hassle, just use the latter.
Needless to say, PHP evolved over > 20 years. Like Java, and Javascript, PHP is “the English language” for the web and there’s no reason for it to stop adapting and evolving for another 20 years.
Yeah, I was never exposed to it. In one class we had an interpreter that pretended to be an assembly language but not really. I was on a project with a drone system that was programmed in 8086 ? assy language. It was very interesting and the programmers could do incredible things but needed the system to be very fast.
Eventually we started specifying that VHDL be used so our systems were virtual firmware. This was very neat and I tried to teach it to college students, but It really was too hard for me so I kept to very simple things.
True. If there is a library with just simple 2d stuff that would be enough for me though.
Love LISP. Trying to figure out Haskell.
I wondered that also. Some areas of software development remain classified. Possibly Space Force black projects are using ADA.
Yup, Turbo Pascal was my favorite..
And Malbolge!
Googled for an image of the Fortran 77 text they had us on, but couldn’t find the right one. Probably still have it, have to check.
Yeah!
What’s with this guy? Some kinda code bigot?!
Why everyone remembers coding their first daemon in Malbolge,,,
That’s a familiar list. I did:
Business Basic on punch cards in college (Mainframe)
Pascal in college (Apple II)
Basic at work (Tandy Model I)
Basic at home (Tandy Color Computer)
MC6809E Assembler (Tandy Color Computer)
Quick Basic (IBM PC)
RPG and CLP for work (IBM AS/400)
Java starting with IBM WebSphere, then for almost anything.
Visual Basic 3, 4, 5 and 6 (Product got too large to port to VB.Net, still in production in VB6)
A little C++ and C#
Java on Android
Objectionable C on iOS
Toyed with random others mentioned above...
Hey fellow old-timer!
I was in the last engineering class at VA Tech to use a slide rule. One kid brought a new-fangled calculator to class (HP, IIRC), and the prof said he could use it if he shared it with everyone else.
;)
You had to hurt my brain, didn’t you? It’s either my index wasn’t initialized correctly or the end on my loop went too far.
Yep. Protection Exception.
Someone looped beyond their boundary (like Leftists are prone to do).
Leftist come in two varieties: SOC4 and SOC7
Awesome.
S0c4 = "Get off my lawn."
S0c7 = "Does not compute."
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