Does anyone miss programming in old languages?
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I recently got pulled in to help out on a 30+ years old mainframe project written in COBOL. It was a bit of shock to realise how much I remembered, since it had been 30+ years since I last worked with COBOL! I occasionally miss my old FORTRAN days (most recently Fortran 77 rather than FORTRAN IV) but I never have yearned to do COBOL (or even PL/1) again. Nostalgic thoughts?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
Sometimes I miss programming in PostScript, the language that, so long ago, gave me my technical "fifteen minutes of fame:" it's like Lisp with a stack, and RPN, welded to a very powerful vector based graphics engine. PostScript's control of namespace lookup by an explicit stack of Dictionaries is very cool. Like Lisp, or other interpreted languages with a full REPL, turning text to code, and the reverse, was easy.
«Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?» T. S. Elliot
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I Sometimes miss the Univac 1100 Assembler that I spent so many years working on. But most modern languages are so much better in many ways.
I miss PLAN (Programming LANguage for the ICL 1900 series). Wrote many nice utilities in that. Still a member of the BCS Fortran SIG, but mainly used FORTRAN IV (and dabbled with F77). 'Modern' (post 1970) languages have added layers of complexity in the guise of simplification.
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I recently got pulled in to help out on a 30+ years old mainframe project written in COBOL. It was a bit of shock to realise how much I remembered, since it had been 30+ years since I last worked with COBOL! I occasionally miss my old FORTRAN days (most recently Fortran 77 rather than FORTRAN IV) but I never have yearned to do COBOL (or even PL/1) again. Nostalgic thoughts?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I miss PLAN (Programming LANguage for the ICL 1900 series). Wrote many nice utilities in that. Still a member of the BCS Fortran SIG, but mainly used FORTRAN IV (and dabbled with F77). 'Modern' (post 1970) languages have added layers of complexity in the guise of simplification.
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I miss PLAN (Programming LANguage for the ICL 1900 series). Wrote many nice utilities in that. Still a member of the BCS Fortran SIG, but mainly used FORTRAN IV (and dabbled with F77). 'Modern' (post 1970) languages have added layers of complexity in the guise of simplification.
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I kinda miss Turbo Pascal... Most fond memory of it was that it was only $30.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013Turbo Pascal was my first thought as well!
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I kinda miss Turbo Pascal... Most fond memory of it was that it was only $30.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013Me too ... and I miss Turbo Prolog even more. Of course, everything was simpler those days. "The only easy day was yesterday" as the Navy Seals say.
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I recently got pulled in to help out on a 30+ years old mainframe project written in COBOL. It was a bit of shock to realise how much I remembered, since it had been 30+ years since I last worked with COBOL! I occasionally miss my old FORTRAN days (most recently Fortran 77 rather than FORTRAN IV) but I never have yearned to do COBOL (or even PL/1) again. Nostalgic thoughts?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
I have always programmed in C++. Except for a stint before it came out when I purchased UCSD Pascal for $100. You got the source code too. Its 16-bit byte codes ran on an interpreter whose idea was later later adopted by Java and Microsoft's reaction to Java, C#. You could debug UCSD Pascal both forwards and backwards, something Visual Studio is still dreaming about doing.
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I kinda miss Turbo Pascal... Most fond memory of it was that it was only $30.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013Those were the days... :)
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I spent a lot of my life coding in Z80 assembler, and sometimes - but not often - I do miss it. Being that "close" to the hardware feels ... natural, if you know what I mean.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Yeah, my first job was on an old IBM Series/1, which ran in this somewhat low-level language called EDL (Event Driven Language). It was kind of assembler-like. Debugging consisted of getting a printout, on the left of which would be the actual compiled code (80A2 as an if-equals, I think). So, you learned a lot of how memory is actually managed by getting that close to the OS. I think that helps understand (or at least be able to theorize) better about what's under the hood when using higher-level languages. I wouldn't say I miss it, Bob. But, it was interesting to peer into the sausage factory, and I think it made me better at thinking about doing things (relatively) efficiently in more modern systems.
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I recently got pulled in to help out on a 30+ years old mainframe project written in COBOL. It was a bit of shock to realise how much I remembered, since it had been 30+ years since I last worked with COBOL! I occasionally miss my old FORTRAN days (most recently Fortran 77 rather than FORTRAN IV) but I never have yearned to do COBOL (or even PL/1) again. Nostalgic thoughts?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
I used many different languages to some extent (some pretty obscure) in my 50+ year programming career. Of them all I think I liked C most of all. It was a short step up from the assembler to learn and was easy for me to use. Being a control freak I felt it gave me the best product from my time. I found the C lib functions straight forward and manageable. This is just an old fart's opinion. I can get by in just about anything. There is truly nothing under the sun. The language syntax and organization changes but it is all pretty much the same.
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I kinda miss Turbo Pascal... Most fond memory of it was that it was only $30.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013Still keeping an old TP app alive that I offered to help out with 25 years ago! DosBox and no "Opening the file" messages - joy!
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I recently got pulled in to help out on a 30+ years old mainframe project written in COBOL. It was a bit of shock to realise how much I remembered, since it had been 30+ years since I last worked with COBOL! I occasionally miss my old FORTRAN days (most recently Fortran 77 rather than FORTRAN IV) but I never have yearned to do COBOL (or even PL/1) again. Nostalgic thoughts?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
I remember them, but I don't exactly miss them enough to download a compiler and start writing Cobol or Fortran code. Almost, but not quite, now we have Mathf and C# so who needs the older languages? Well, unless you are called on to do a code conversion or repair old code. I learned with Basic and Pascal. But I will never refer a beginner to those languages these days.
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Turbo Pascal was my first thought as well!
Same here
- Leonardo
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There are the languages I really liked working in at the time: Ada, VAX FORTRAN, VAX/VMS DCL (scripting), LISP, and Intel assembly language using a flat memory model. At the time I developed sufficient fluency in each of these that I could solve any programming problem you like in them, given enough time. Interestingly, I don't feel any nostalgia to go back to programming in any of them. The amenities available now in most languages are so superior it's incredible. I know that Ada, FORTRAN, and LISP all have contemporary versions with modern facilities, but those all seem to have a "me too!" flavor to them. Today my language of choice is C# unless there's substantial bit/byte-fiddling to be done, and then it's C++.
Software Zen:
delete this;I loved the VAX/VMS system. I used Pascal, some C, DCL, FMS, and others. I had a 2 shelf set of manuals from DEC, which if you followed the rules everything would just work. I even developed a primitive pre-object system where I would pass a structure for specific data entry forms to several routines; saved a lot of coding.
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FoxPro for DOS (pre-MS). I wrote a sales lead tracking application (think early CRM) that ran unchanged for well over a decade. It even survived Y2K. ;P
I used FoxPro for DOS at my workplace to create some pretty complicated applications. Once, during an upgrade to our payroll system used for almost 20,000 employees, I wrote an application to compare the master file output from the old version with the new version, looking for differences which would signal compatibility issues. This app helped to eliminate a lot of confusion and busy work by our HR and payroll folks to ferret out those problems. My star shone a little brighter for a while...sigh.
FoxPro fan
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I recently got pulled in to help out on a 30+ years old mainframe project written in COBOL. It was a bit of shock to realise how much I remembered, since it had been 30+ years since I last worked with COBOL! I occasionally miss my old FORTRAN days (most recently Fortran 77 rather than FORTRAN IV) but I never have yearned to do COBOL (or even PL/1) again. Nostalgic thoughts?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
I programmed in a new language called C# almost twenty years ago when it first came out. I don't miss it though. I still use it nearly every day.
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I Sometimes miss the Univac 1100 Assembler that I spent so many years working on. But most modern languages are so much better in many ways.
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Fortran 77, I took a Basic class (my first programming class) before this and darn near swore off programming, as the spaghettification factor was overwhelming. A math instructor talking me into taking Fortran class and I loved it. Motorola HC11 assembler is another one, my first assembler language. At the time Motorola had what I thought was really good documentation regarding the chips' operation and the instruction set, coded a lot of assembler back then.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment "Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst "I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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I loved the VAX/VMS system. I used Pascal, some C, DCL, FMS, and others. I had a 2 shelf set of manuals from DEC, which if you followed the rules everything would just work. I even developed a primitive pre-object system where I would pass a structure for specific data entry forms to several routines; saved a lot of coding.
