Favorite Programming Languages

What Are Your Favorite Programming Languages?

  • Java

    Votes: 8 15.7%
  • C

    Votes: 16 31.4%
  • C++

    Votes: 10 19.6%
  • Python

    Votes: 6 11.8%
  • C#

    Votes: 8 15.7%
  • JavaScript

    Votes: 6 11.8%
  • Visual Basic .NET

    Votes: 4 7.8%
  • PHP

    Votes: 4 7.8%
  • Delphi / Object Pascal

    Votes: 3 5.9%
  • Assembly Language

    Votes: 15 29.4%

  • Total voters
    51
Cold Fusion. Hands down.

Simple as HTML as it is also a tag based markup language.
 
Oh dear, where to start? Our programming class in college still had to work with FORTRAN on an IBM 1130 with punched card reader. We would sneak down into the basement after hours and boot up the old Bendix G-15 (which took about 30 minutes) so we could play Eliza and Blackjack. It used a mechanical typewriter wired with solenoids as an I/O device. Its read/write storage was a metal cassette loaded with paper tape, and it kept dynamic memory on a rotating drum about the size of the one in a clothes dryer, circled with magnetic tape strips. The logic circuits were plug-in modules each containing multiple vacuum tubes; to access them, you opened up the machine like a refrigerator.

We barely got video terminals for our brand new PDP 11/45 before I graduated. Up till then it was all DECWriter and reams of paper to capture a session. I personally saw several students drop out of school because they got hooked on playing with the computers and quit going to class. Me, I was too busy collecting advertising pamphlets for the various new exciting audio gear which was coming out - and taking day trips to towns with stereo shops in hope of finding the perfect speakers.

In the ensuing 40 years, I worked with over 40 programming languages at one time or another. These days, assembly language is not designed to be coded by humans any more, which is a loss. I think PDP-11 assembly, C, and PL/M are probably the best programming languages ever developed; C++, Java, and the rest of the mob fell victim to the mistaken notion that object oriented programming is somehow better or more powerful. It has led to more laziness and inefficiency by programmers than any other single paradigm - and I say that, having programmed Java for 18 years.

Also, my wife attended a seminar given by Grace Hopper sometime back in the 80s; she was handing out nanoseconds to the class (little knotted pieces of string, about 1 foot long). Definitely a computing pioneer.
 
Oh dear, where to start? Our programming class in college still had to work with FORTRAN on an IBM 1130 with punched card reader. We would sneak down into the basement after hours and boot up the old Bendix G-15 (which took about 30 minutes) so we could play Eliza and Blackjack. It used a mechanical typewriter wired with solenoids as an I/O device. Its read/write storage was a metal cassette loaded with paper tape, and it kept dynamic memory on a rotating drum about the size of the one in a clothes dryer, circled with magnetic tape strips. The logic circuits were plug-in modules each containing multiple vacuum tubes; to access them, you opened up the machine like a refrigerator.

We barely got video terminals for our brand new PDP 11/45 before I graduated. Up till then it was all DECWriter and reams of paper to capture a session. I personally saw several students drop out of school because they got hooked on playing with the computers and quit going to class. Me, I was too busy collecting advertising pamphlets for the various new exciting audio gear which was coming out - and taking day trips to towns with stereo shops in hope of finding the perfect speakers.

In the ensuing 40 years, I worked with over 40 programming languages at one time or another. These days, assembly language is not designed to be coded by humans any more, which is a loss. I think PDP-11 assembly, C, and PL/M are probably the best programming languages ever developed; C++, Java, and the rest of the mob fell victim to the mistaken notion that object oriented programming is somehow better or more powerful. It has led to more laziness and inefficiency by programmers than any other single paradigm - and I say that, having programmed Java for 18 years.

Also, my wife attended a seminar given by Grace Hopper sometime back in the 80s; she was handing out nanoseconds to the class (little knotted pieces of string, about 1 foot long). Definitely a computing pioneer.
Absolutely agree in terms of OOP. Call me old school but to me, language evolution halted with C programming.

No one understands efficiency and pure elegance of machine coding anymore.

Anybody ever started up a machine by switch register? No more of that anymore (at least.)
 
You had to throw a couple of switches before loading the G-15, but it wasn't clear whether they set register values or just told it that it needed to poll the I/O devices. The PDP-11 we used to control some of our environmental test systems still needed to be started by loading the program counter with the boot address though.

I once had to write an 80-column board video driver for an Apple ][ that fit into 256 bytes; that took some thinking. One of the things I liked about PL/M was that its compiler optimizer produced better machine code than I could. Of course it was that ugly 8080-derived segment register language, but still... We wrote a control system for our airborne radar pod in less than 48 KBytes using that compiler, and we never found an error which wasn't due to the programmer. Contrast that with modern OOP code which will compile and then throw runtime errors because of poor documentation, and (even without a GUI) generates megabytes of code for simple logic constructions. Folks, you don't NEED to load every library in the world in order to add two numbers...

Sun proudly announces that billions of devices run Java, and my only thought is that when the crash comes, it's going to be devastating.
 
It's interesting to read about some here disliking OOP, yet that is what the schools are pushing hard in their programming language classes. It's a required part of the coursework. Even in my limited sphere of knowledge, many are ridiculed if they don't use OOP in their programming. I still don't fully "get" OOP. Yet in the degree I got a few years back, I had to take a handful of different language classes, and much of it is the same structure--it all boils down to different syntax for each one.

I also agree with one reply above that hints at the flood of "languages" out there today. That is one reason I got out of doing the development work I used to do--new stuff was coming along just too fast, and each one sort of quartered itself off into little cliques. You had to invest a ton of money, get trained, specialize your work, then hope like hell you chose the right thing so it didn't get phased out a few years later.

I've had to use PHP and MySQL out of necessity due to the type of work I (used to) do. This forum is powered by PHP; WordPress is powered by PHP (and it powers many sites on the Web), so that is what I sort of specialize(d) in . I still dabble in it but only for support purposes. My days of doing anything from the ground up are long past. I can't concentrate long enough anymore to grasp it. I always had fun with MySQL though--I loved building queries. Along with these, I've had to use HTML, CSS and other related things. I still remember fighting my way around "procmail," setting up filters to stem the tide of ever-increasing spam back in the day--that was a language unto itself. And even today, I still try to grasp how the Apache web server is configured. I think I just get a handle on it, and then I break something else :D

I will say, though, that I hate JavaScript with a passion. That has to be the flakiest language I've ever had to deal with (out of necessity, no less). Vague error messages and unpredictable behavior make it a pain to troubleshoot. One of my courses involved JavaScript and I passed it with flying colors, but still...out in the real world, I think it's pitiful.

The only language I putzed around with from the mid 80s onward was BASICA (Advanced BASIC), which came with an IBM-PC clone I had back then. Made a few silly programs, had fun with it. Made a Thiele-Small calculator for speaker design, based on formulas from the Speaker Builder magazine. I still have that on an old 5¼" floppy somewhere.
 
I still try to grasp how the Apache web server is configured. I think I just get a handle on it, and then I break something else :D
Ha! My brief dealing with Apache leads me to believe that "patching holes" during configuration is what that whole world is about! :crazy:

Drove me nuts dealing with customers about this... See what you did? Now I'm gonna get nightmares behind this... :eek:
 
I taught myself basic Python recently to do some webscraping... HATE SNAKE HATE HATE HATE...

I still reach for perl when I need to hack up something real quick if I can't write a Bourne/Bourne Again shell script. Alas neither have updated APIs to do scraping *sigh*.
 
Current favorite is C# because it's the one I'm learning at the moment.
I had a go at C in the late 90's after being introduced to it at university, but didn't really get into it that deep. About a year ago, I decided I wanted to make some tools for myself to use at work and I began looking at C# and .Net. After getting over the initial hump learning Visual Studio, I fell into the rabbit hole that is WPF and MVVM. Still trying to get my head around many of the concepts, but the C# coding is improving day by day. I like the relativly simple syntax of it, and there are tons of resources online that I can turn to when I get stuck.
 
I taught myself basic Python recently to do some webscraping... HATE SNAKE HATE HATE HATE...

I still reach for perl when I need to hack up something real quick if I can't write a Bourne/Bourne Again shell script. Alas neither have updated APIs to do scraping *sigh*.
Python is like the "cables and interconnects" of programming languages. Lots of outrage and defensiveness on stackoverflow if anybody dares ask a simple reasonable question. There are some pretty good rants there by non-python guys - from "python: changes to my copy variable affect the original variable [duplicate]"
Non-Python Guy said:
I just spend the past 3 hours trying to debug my program... I thought I was going mad. This was the most infuriating bug I have EVER ran into. Wow... – 43.52.4D. Mar 17 '16 at 7:05
Python Guy said:
@43.52.4D. Only it's not a bug :) – yuvi Mar 17 '16 at 7:13
 
I started with Fortran II on punch cards on an IBM 7074 at Penn State around 1963. I wrote a trajectory code for model rockets. Now I use gfortran (open source and free under Linux), but the Fortran gets converted to C to be compiled.
 
Absolutely agree in terms of OOP. Call me old school but to me, language evolution halted with C programming.

No one understands efficiency and pure elegance of machine coding anymore.

Anybody ever started up a machine by switch register? No more of that anymore (at least.)
Yep. Data General Nova system. 4-bit accumulator multiplexed 4x for 16 bit math 11 step program entered from front panel then hit reset/load to get the paper tape to load - then voila! Basic on the console.
 
Python is like the "cables and interconnects" of programming languages. Lots of outrage and defensiveness on stackoverflow if anybody dares ask a simple reasonable question. There are some pretty good rants there by non-python guys - from "python: changes to my copy variable affect the original variable [duplicate]"
I think I should write the "Why I Hate Python" book. Mostly because it's inconsistent as hell, changing every time a new version comes out.
 
Off topic a little, but my personal pet peeve in the programming world is this ridiculous use of scrum, agile, etc... Just people trying to make money on design methodology that's been around for years. But let's face it, bean counter and management types love those buzzwords.
 
I'm knee deep in this crap again. Configuring all sorts of "stuff" on a new set of three cloud servers, all running Ubuntu, trying not to break anything, and hoping nobody outside tries to break anything either. Already blocked a few dozen countries straight away using the firewall. Two of the three are accessed only via a local network, so, no outside access once I am done setting things up. Shell scripts, the occasional Perl script, plus the syntax of the configuration files of a couple dozen things I am actively working with.

Then, dealing with outgoing email--Google's dumping everything in spam folders. (At least it is not flat out rejecting email like it was a week ago.) SPF records, DKIM message signing, DMARC, making sure the server has a proper FQDN for the hostname so I have a correct PTR record in place...all this screwing around, everything set up properly, yet everything is still going to spam. And all of this nonsense has its own peculiar syntax.

The only upside? I don't ever have to use procmail again. I think I'd rather get a root canal performed through my left nostril than deal with procmail ever again.

Then, having to move dozens of things from two other hosting services to this cloud server array...getting SSL certificates (way too easy now with Let's Encrypt and certbot), adding Apache vhosts, setting file ownership and permissions, and all that. And stuff breaks when it's moved from one server to another. Deadline is tomorrow night, when one of the old servers will be decomissioned. Guess who's getting limited sleep lately?
 
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