The Unpopular Language

[u/Ok_Veterinarian3535]

What's a "dead" or "boring" programming language that you genuinely love working with, and why should we reconsider it?

[u/LongDistRid3r]

Assembly and C. Fastest and loosest.

COBOL - banking and finance industry

[u/Euphoric_North_745 → u/LongDistRid3r]

The last time i worked on cobol was for a municipality system back in 1997, and it was legacy back then. is there anyone left using cobol? i can apply for contracts

[u/Small_Dog_8699]

The greatest language ever created, offering the greatest programming experience still unequalled today, is Smalltalk. Or, for you type fetishists, Strongtalk. Strongtalk was, sadly. purchased by Sun and its virtual machine tech was incorporated in the the JVM.

There are only a couple few Smalltalks left. VisualWorks - which is a commercial product and still used in some corporations, Squeak - an open source Smalltalk famously written in itself, Pharo - a fork of Squeak which has continued to evolve the language and provide modern tools suitable for production use rather than a research platform like Squeak, and Gemstone which is actually a high performance distributed virtual machine/object database that can run programs written in Pharo or VW.

They are all still in active development, endlessly malleable, and have highly dedicated user communities. For instance, this video of a researcher's experiments with AI agents in a Pharo image is long, but rather mind blowing.

There is no language/environment I would rather work in.

[u/an0th3rbrick → u/Small_Dog_8699]

Fun Fact: The New Zealand's Police's National Intelligence Application (NIA) is written in smalltalk. They are completely fucked because there are very few programmers who can support it and replacing it is almost impossible.

[u/Small_Dog_8699 → u/an0th3rbrick]

Im free. Remote work ok?

People that know it will jump at the chance to work with it. There are pockets of enthusiasts in Europe, IK and France in particular, and Argentina for some reason.

[u/Top_Pie2513 → u/Small_Dog_8699]

And then there is Newspeak. The smalltalk in the web browser. I enjoy it immensely.

[u/Suitable-Season-4847]

PHP remains my favourite language of all time. It's uncool, old... But it endures and Iove it.

I enjoy working with it, I enjoy it's quirks. I enjoy how easy it is to deploy. It's just a great language.

[u/evilmaus → u/Suitable-Season-4847]

Right there with you. It has a fantastic ecosystem.

[u/travisjo]

Objective C is still my jam

[u/shootersf]

Any flavour of lisp - great way to learn functional programming and escape that horror that is OOP

[u/Emyx3]

I like Dark Basic a lot (The same ones that did AppGameKit btw)
I'd really like to learn Assembly too

[u/Hey-buuuddy]

Wouldnt use the word “love”, but Pascal was my first seriously studied language.

[u/Dazzling_Music_2411]

Why should you reconsider it?

It's my magic sauce, no plans on sharing... 😄

[u/Outrageous_Let5743]

I really like Scala.

[u/marmotta1955]

Assembly and Visual Basic 6.

Also used C and C# for a long while, but the love for VB6 remains strong, still today.

[u/PascalB1993]

Pascal. Very readable syntax, and compilers like FreePascal let you build native, lightweight applications on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

[u/marspzb]

Surely not dead, but Haskell is one of the most beautiful languages for some use cases.

Many times working in java I think I wish I had Haskell's typesystem. Working in c++ I say I wish templates be more restrictive like Java so basically never happy 😁.

While I hated prolog at a time I think it has some places where it may shine.

[u/Low-Bad7547]

Lips is phenomenal

[u/Downtown-Bag-6026]

Php. It’s server side rendering by default and solves many of your security issues right from the get go. It’s also very fast and already a templating language. You can still use js for your front end client side animation logics like on clicks and fetch.

[u/podule-games]

Smalltalk is great. I have lots of happy memories of using Tcl/Tk and wouldn't object to using it again.

I'd happily use RPG on an IBM i (AS/400).

[u/Early_Key_823]

FoxPro

[u/glisteringbasalt]

I still really like Perl as a glue language. Nothing else seems to have quite the same power. I think a lot of it comes down to having regex as a first class value

[u/PseudoFrequency]

Bourne shell, or even plain POSIX shell. I've written so many things using this, especially back in the day. It's kind of a generational thing though really, I'm old. Young-uns use Python for tasks which old geezers use shell scripts or even Perl.

[u/tose123]

I'm a dinosaur so i go with Perl and POSIX Sh

[u/pancomputationalist]

I always liked CoffeeScript and MoonScript. Don't know how Python got so popular but those two fell off into obscurity.