Do you still use any of those programming languages?

1 point·tarek_computer··4 comments

I picked up a late 70s book that discusses the following languages, Algol, APL, APT, BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, GPSS, JOSS, JOVIAL, LISP, PL/I, SIMULA, and SNOBOL. Does any of such languages strike a chord if any for you?

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I've used several of them. I wouldn't like to use any of them now except Lisp, which of course is still going strong.

Two that I loved at the time were Algol68 and SNOBOL. Algol68 was so sophisticated for its time but I'm not aware of any advantages over modern languages. SNOBOL was lots of fun to write, but I found it write-only.

I don't use APL, but I do occasionally use j (https://www.jsoftware.com/), which is basically APL without the special character set, although mostly for fun. I have not written any FORTRAN in a very long time, but I still compile FORTRAN code every once a while. As other noted, LISP is going strong, it's the only one on the list that I use somewhat regularly.

Speaking of old languages, in mid 80's I was on a team that worked on a machine translation system, and we used a language called Q. The few keywords the language had were in French, and it was based on tree rewriting. I wonder if that is still around.

Fortran is still used today for scientific computing. Lisp is used by Emacs users as a scripting language.

I personally used BASIC a lot back in the day, but more Pascal, actually, which had a fantastic text-based IDE. It deserves a place in that list!… :)

Fwiw I used VB.Net from about 2004-2011 pretty extensively which is C# in BASICs clothing.

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