You guys remember Pascal and cobol

[Ken g6]

What is the high-level language designed around static single-assignment? Eiffel? Erlang? Something like that. I always thought that was an interesting idea for reliability, though I never learned that language.

Are you talking about functional programming languages? Standard ML? I think MS F# might be like that, but I've never tried it.

lisp was another amusing language back then - it was nothing like today's lisp.

I used to use something called Reverse Polish Lisp, or RPL on HP calculators. But I don't think it was very LISP-y. It was more like BASIC with a stack. Which meant virtually no parentheses.

 

[Ajay]

Cobol was terrible, IMHO. So was BASIC. Fortran was annoyingly picky. When I learned Pascal it was like a breath of fresh air. Later on, as a project for a course in Programming Language Structures, I wrote a 25 page comparison of C++ and Ada 95. Ada was superior in almost every way. Boeing, when writing new inflight software project created two teams - one started using C++, the other used Ada. The C++ code was so buggy that that part of the project was dropped and all the C++ coders were folded into the Ada development team. Ada didn't become more popular as it didn't enter into any mass market applications - too bad, we could have avoided so much problematic C++ code - such is life.

 

[mxnerd]

Learned a lot of different languages (Fortran, Cobol, C, Pascal, MS Basic, Lisp, x86 assembly, Ada, SQL) in the school, but none was used for job.

Begin with Clipper for work, then Foxpo, VB, Access, VBA, VBScript, JavaScript...

Once you learned a language, you can pick up other languages more easily.

The hardest part is the transition from functional to object oriented and event driven programming.

And guess what, Clipper is the first object oriented and event driven programming language I touched under DOS!

 

[you2]

One annoying new language is python - that part that i dislike is the use of spaces to delimit body of a compound statement (i.e, loops).

One problem with this thread is when we talk about languages they are moving targets - esp the older ones like fortran, lisp, and so forth. I remember learning common lisp on a dec-10 and then visiting a friend in cali and he was talking about all the wonderful new additions being added to the language (labels, loops, ...); but the original lisp (or at least the version I learned) had basically two constructs atoms and expressions. There were a few primitives for expressions like car and cdr - but the entire language was basically (f x1 x2) with the bottom of the recursion being car or cdr.... To be honest once i started 'thinking' in lisp it was really a lot of fun - almost as much as snobol. Professionally nearly all of my work has been in C and later C++ and Java - with a little python, pearl (another horrible but very powerful language), ... Java is ok - sort of like a thread ecentric version of pascal as far as i'm concern but with a very large and powerful library - unfortunately some of the elements of java library are prone to chewing up memory due to how strings are defined (an aspect of the language i really dislike).
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C++ isn't bad - kind of fun at time but STL could use some improvements - i mean it could be made a primitive in the language so some of the kludges used to glue it on top of the language could be removed.
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Google has a simplified version of C/C++ called go that i haven't bothered to learn but I wonder if it has decent flow. from what I've seen they over simplifieid C++ and something in the middle would be more appealing.

 

[pcgeek11]

I did learn some Fortran back a Loooooong time ago.

 

[Spydermag68]

In college I learned Fortran 88, Pascal, C, C++, LISP, 8806 assembly and a few others. My first job was in Fortran and C. My second job I learned TPF assembly for OS 390 mainframes. Since then I have been working in C# for the most part.

 

[Stiff Clamp]

I coded some COBOL programs back around Y2k. From specs - not modifying existing code.
But school taught me C++ and Pascal.
The COBOL I learned in 6 weeks of corporate training. Along with JCL(Job Control Language) and DB2. So I could work contract assignments.
At one point I coded a backup utility for mainframe data sets using CLiST. I'd never heard of CLIST (Command List) before so I referred to the online help to teach me syntax.

 

[Leymenaide]

I taught at a Community College in NJ @ Y2K and about that time an old timer got the idea to offer Cobol. I do not remember how many semesters they ran it but there was enough interest to run a course. Interest was finance.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The DMS phone switches we have run on pascal I believe. Never programmed it myself though.

 

[you2]

The DMS phone switches we have run on pascal I believe. Never programmed it myself though.

pascal is ok i guess; kind of a classless stuffy java as it predates much of the move to object oriented development. turbo pascal (for those who remember it) on the other hand was a blessing. Revolutionize software development on the old 88. Rember it and desmeth C which was also one of those great things from the old days (notice no ms mentioned - there is a reason in those days their stuff was garbage).

 

[robphelan]

apparently, COBOL is very similar to ABAP which is SAP's proprietary language.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I had COBOL in my first semester of compsci (long story but never got the degree). After enjoying the small tasks that the instructor threw at us during the semester, I decided to do something ambitious in COBOL that almost everyone thought was crazy. I implemented a text based on-screen table that updated the sums properly if I changed the numerical value in any cell. It was supposed to be a challenge to myself to see if I could create my own little Excel imitation minus the formulas and advanced stuff.

When it worked as intended, that's when I knew I was destined to be a code mangler. It only took 50 printed A4 pages

 

[lakedude]

Learned a bit of COBAL in high school. It seemed awful. Everything was simulated on green and white paper but was never actually converted to punch cards and ran on an actual computer.

Took WATFIV Fortran (on punch cards) and Pascal in college.

Picking up BASIC was trivial after that.

We called that HP calculator stuff RPN for Reverse Polish Notation. Still got an original 12c financial and a modern 15c after the original was stolen.

Had a couple weeks of some low level assembler or machine level coding. Don't remember but it helped a lot to understand how a CPU actually works.

I still put line numbers in my basic programs...

 

[manly]

Posted in another thread, but it belongs here:

WSJ - Niklaus Wirth, Who Inspired a Generation of Computer Programmers, Dies at 89

 

[igor_kavinski]

We called that HP calculator stuff RPN for Reverse Polish Notation.

RPN is just push and pop on the stack but the way the inventor figured out how to make it work flawlessly is pure unadulterated genius.