Programmers: Using any offbeat languages?

[qnr]

Actually, I just wanted to see if I could post, to be entirely honest heheh

Me, I prefer to code in Modula-2 and Ada

[ThoughtCriminal]

1. Delphi

Not really offbeat, but I meet other programmers who don't know what it is.

[qnr]

2. Never tried it, hear it's pretty closely related to M2 though n/t

[RetroLounge]

10. Been coding in Delphi since Delphi 1 came out

Not offbeat. Just underappreciated...

RL

[huellewig]

3. COBOL and RUBY.

But PHP pays the bills. :-)

[RogueTrooper]

4. C

not an offbeat language - but I use it to develop software for digital tv set top boxes.

[TrogL]

18. Me too

I'm using it to....oh nevermind, I don't even want to try and explain.

:scared::scared::scared::scared::scared:

[regularguy]

5. I still use a hell of alot of AWK.

[qnr]

6. AWK here too

Our distros package manager is done entirely in bash, so lots of sed and awk.

[regularguy]

9. Cool...

The youngins around here have me using some PERL, but I still love my csh/sed/awk.

[pagerbear]

7. DL Pager

Hence the name.

Also Exstream Dialogue, which fucking sucks!

[qnr]

27. Must admit

I have never so much as heard of those. :/

[pagerbear]

28. Well, you're not in the financial printing business, are you?

I can feel your envy!

[hunter]

8. Sinclair Basic...

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/sinclairbasic/

"Turbo-Basic" (no, no, not Borland Turbo Basic) and Action! for the Atari 800 were wonderful languages too.

I designed and built a scanner attachment for the Atari 800 that fit in a printer ribbon cartridge. That was totally cool, but I never made any money off of it.

6502 assembly language rocks. I love that little microprocessor.

The first programming I ever did for money was for the 1802. This was a very early RISC style CMOS processor, and to save power you could slow the clock speed down to zero. This was very useful for intermittint data logging applications -- the device could go to sleep whenever it wasn't collecting data.

http://www.cosmacelf.com/

I wrote tons of stuff using Borland's Turbo pascal. A lot of this software stopped working with faster Pentium style computers because of a shortsighted error in Turbo pascal's time-keeping routines, but these problems were often remarkably easy to fix with some simple changes to the libraries and a recompile.

Many old DOS games didn't play on newer computers because they were written in Turbo pascal. You could fix them by running them on an emulated DOS machine, but I spent a lot of time bothering burned-out game authors to post their Turbo pascal source code.

My current love is php, which used to be an offbeat language called "PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, " written by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 for his own use.

Nowadays php is fantastically mainstream...

[qnr]

11. I agree - BASIC was lots of fun

I used to enjoy Action!, and Atari BASIC too (loved how I could make self modifying code with it). Also GFA BASIC on the Atari ST & TT (and X11 BASIC, which is a derivative of it on Linux)

I used to have a scanner that attached to the printhead of a dot matrix, can't remember if it was for the 8-bits or the ST though.

Yeah, everyone and their grandmother is using PHP these days :) - hardly offbeat

[midnight armadillo]

12. Objective CaML

www.ocaml.org

It's statically and strongly typed, garbage collected, supports objects,
and has both bytecode interpreters and native compilers. The native code
is typically within 10% of equivalent C code.

It also has a straightforward C interface and is primarily a functional
language that also supports imperative programming. Oh, and there's a
nice module system too.

Beats the bejesus out have having to write in F90 like I do these days...

I've also dabbed in Haskell in the past (www.haskell.org). It's not for me!

[htuttle]

13. Objective C

Not as obscure as it used to be, especially on Mac OSX.

Looks like Smalltalk -- runs like C++.

When I was first starting out, I tried out a lot of offbeat languages -- mostly Wirth-inspired ones like Oberon and Modula-2 (free compilers).

[sangh0]

14. An obscure language called MUMPS

now known as Cache.

[Squeech]

16. Last time I was job hunting

One of the interviews I got was with this company that works in a proprietary version of MUMPS, which they call MAGIC. I hated it-- made you write all your arithmetic in postfix, the = operator had side effects, etc. And they didn't want to give me any credit for my 12 years of programming experience but wanted to hire me at the same rate they'd pay a college kid.

So now I work in COBOL-- lower status, and I'm not learning anything new, but the pay is way better.

I think the oddest language I ever did anything in for a salary was a one-off assignment to tweak a billing application in a language called DIBOL. It ran on an old Wang (I think) desktop machine, so old that it used 8" floppies.

[sangh0]

25. That's unusual

I've heard of MAGIC but never used it. Unlike MAGIC, MUMPS does not require postfix arithmetic, and the only side effect from using the = operator is that it might convert a string to number or a number to a string.

And as far as pay goes, while there some cheap MUMPS employers, it's basically a seller's market, and MUMPS programmers often earn more than their equivalents who program in other, more mainstream, languages.

The oddest language I programmed in was LISP, but I didn't mention it because I only used it in school. No professional experience.

[qnr]

26. Ah yes, LISP, my old AI/Expert System programming days n/t

[Zero Gravitas]

29. Scheme

I had to use scheme at school (a variant of LISP) I hated it with all those darn parens. We even had to wrtie a scheme complier in scheme. Dreadful.

I just use C now, its much nicer.

[hunter]

15. Oh man, how could I forget FORTH???

Especially fig-Forth.

[qnr]

17. oh yeah, I dabble with Brainf*ck

been a looong time since I've played with Forth

terry@timestorm: /home/terry
13:35:58 $ gaze what brainfuck
brainfuck:
First conceived and implemented by Urban Mueller on the Amiga
computer system, Brainf*ck is a computer programming language
with only eight commands and a really tiny compiler.

http://www.catseye.mb.ca/esoteric/bf/

[no name no slogan]

22. get outta TOWN!

I just heard about this language a couple of months ago. Brilliant concept! After all, eight operators should be plenty for a creative programmer.

I keep thinking that it might be fun to do some stuff in it at work, and then watch everybody else try to figure out what's going on. Too bad I'm such a nice guy...

[Misunderestimator]

19. Smalltalk and Clipper... but I'm a manager now...

So it doesn't really matter. Peoplesoft and Oracle are the apps and SQL is the main thingy...

[no name no slogan]

20. IdocScript

It's the scripting language for Stellent's content management/web publishing products. It's not much different from VBScript or JavaScript in most respects.

But just because we're using it doesn't mean we like writing in it! :evilgrin:

[Xithras]

21. Tandy Basic

I pulled my ancient CoCo2 out of a box two weeks ago and have been having fun seeing how much I remembered :)

Of course, I lost the tape drive a decade ago, so I can't save any of my work :(

[qnr]

23. Bleagh - we just got rid of

one prior to our move about two months ago. Someone gave me the system since they know I'm into retro computer, however, the only Tandy I've ever really owned was a Model 100

[cheezus]

24. Ada??? I used to kick ass at Ada

it was my first *formally instruced* language. The prof was really good too and made us into top rade Ada coders.

then the uni switched to java for that course

working on obj-c right now (for the mac)... still want to learn python