Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

Many folks have said it here but I&#x27;ll say it again: Common Lisp.<p>I have been using it professionally for 5+ years as a full-time employee at various companies. Some big-name ones, some smaller start-up ones. The mean Lisp team size has been around 4, but I did work on a project of 15 Lisp programmers. None of these projects were legacy code. Some were in places you wouldn&#x27;t expect (embedded, multi-processor systems on custom-designed boards, for example). In every single case, we had no additional trouble hiring a Lisp or Lisp-capable programmer as compared to hiring for any other language, including Python. (In fact, Python was more difficult to hire for because the market is saturated with beginners who claim expertise.)<p>Lisp is one of those languages where the ratio of long-term benefits and productivity vs. good initial impressions is at a record high. It doesn&#x27;t look like C or Python or JS, with all the parentheses, so people brush it off.<p>Lisp isn&#x27;t the pinnacle of every great idea to come about in computer science and software engineering, but it is one of the most robust, macroscopically well designed, and most productive languages for translating arbitrary abstract ideas into maintainable, production code. Even if it doesn&#x27;t look initially very pretty in the eyes of a career Python programmer.

- sh (I really don&#x27;t use bash features in scripting)<p>- awk<p>- perl<p>- sed, if that counts as language.<p>It&#x27;s funny that a course that I took in university almost 29 years ago, for learning the use of Unix scripting tools, is one of the most useful learning experiences in my daily work today - even if my job is not really a programmer. But very often I see colleagues (project managers, architects etc) struggle with processing information in ways that involve a lot of repetition and manularity. Scripting solves those things.<p>(For some things also Excel and VB perhaps counts as an &quot;old&quot; programming language; it is also often quite useful. And I probably will end up doing something in C again this year.)

SQL. If I had to pick a language that I&#x27;ll use my entire career that&#x27;s the one. It has been overused and underused, but always relevant.

Lots and lots of C. (I&#x27;m mostly an embedded C programmer these days). Some C++ for a bit of higher-level &quot;business logic&quot; that benefits from a class-based approach, but a fairly limited subset of &quot;modern&quot; C++.

Tcl. It works really well as a cross-platform (*nix&#x2F;Windows) alternative to shell scripting that doesn&#x27;t suffer from the same problems as the POSIX shell (see <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dwheeler.com&#x2F;essays&#x2F;fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dwheeler.com&#x2F;essays&#x2F;fixing-unix-linux-filenames.h...</a>). It builds on the same foundation of everything being text but with a few changes to the substitution rules builds something a lot like a Lisp on top of it.

Most of my work is in C++, which is almost 35 years old. By far the best choice of language for cross-platform, client application development, especially C++11&#x2F;C++14, which bring modern language features (e.g. lambdas, futures, etc) with all the original benefits of the language.

Too old for any one language to have lasted my entire career. But:<p>C for (embedded(embedded))* audio DSP engine, with hardware specific intrinsics and occasional drops into inline ASM when those fail. When every cycle counts and Hard Real Time contracts must be met, to me it is anathema for any invisible compiler-generated code to exist - such breaks the required determinism. So no C++. Would write in pure ASM in the old days. Still want to - most times the C preamble&#x2F;postamble is not needed in event handler functions. But TPTB dictate otherwise. Small talent pool and they want Jr progs to take it over.<p>FORTH as the most useful interactive hardware&#x2F;low level software debugging tool for behavioral debugging (vs post mortem breakpoint debugging, which loses the behavioral context). Used to use hardware logic analysers for this but system complexity out-grew them. I should note I am not using a commercial FORTH, rather a freeware core greatly extended and modified by me for this purpose. Used it in several projects with different CPUs and architectures over the years. Can feed it C headers for readable dumps too (translator written in PERL). Key point: does this while the target continues executing. Caveat: do NOT use unless you know and understand every line of code in the engine and its implications for the target system. Given that, it&#x27;s the sharpest double-edged handle-less debugging tool I&#x27;ve ever found.<p>* the DSP engine is embedded inside a larger embedded system. All inside the same chip. Makes for interesting times when one cannot touch it directly in main OS land.

Pascal&#x2F;Delphi<p>Before there was an internet of lightbulbs and smoke detectors, there was an internet of industrial process things.<p>And they used windows 2000 and Delphi. They <i>still</i> do.

Lisp, and specifically Common Lisp although the latter isn&#x27;t that old.<p>It first appeared in 1984 and the ANSI specification was finished in 1994, but it traces its lineage directly back to Lisp 1.5 from 1962. It can run Lisp sources decades older than it trivially.<p>It is a very practical, multi-paradigm language with high quality, high performance implementations on many platforms.<p>Its main issue is that it is not very popular, but that might also be a blessing.

Lisp. For all purposes. It conquered my brain in 1988 and ever since then it&#x27;s the first thing I turn to whenever it&#x27;s an option. My favorite Lisp ever was Ralph. My favorite nowadays is Common Lisp. Generally speaking, I like any Lisp better than anything else, but I prefer those that preserve the whole interactive programming-as-teaching culture in all its glory.<p>Python for when someone needs me to work on Django, and also for helping my younger daughter learn programming, because it&#x27;s a pretty accessible place to start.<p>C when I need to be that close to the machine and there&#x27;s some reason not to use Lisp.

C (I hate C++)<p>assembler (various) (I&#x27;ve even learned x86_64 well after being a RISC aficionado, it&#x27;s actually kinda neat)<p>sed<p>bash<p>LaTex<p>I used to use YACC&#x2F;LEX but that&#x27;s been replaced with ANTLR for awhile now.<p>What language am I starting to use? Rust and R.<p>I wrote something in PERL once but when I woke up the next day I couldn&#x27;t really read it. So that was that.

Ocaml (which will turn 21 this year).<p>It really hits a sweet spot for me:<p>- fast executables<p>- fast compile times<p>- very expressive<p>- good standard library in &#x27;Core&#x27;<p>- a REPL so you can easily play around with code you have just written<p>- a type system that&#x27;s really useful for catching bugs<p>- imperative programming is relatively easy<p>I find myself becoming more and more productive. I will have to see if writing a little server for JSON web API sitting behind nginx is feasible - currently using ruby for that.

I do scientific computing in academia.<p>Secretly, it&#x27;s just fortran all the way down, and LaTeX for document preparation.<p>Piled on top of that is a fair amount of matlab, simulink, and python.

MUMPS. Despite its strong resemblance to compiler IR and lack of a type system, it is the standard DB in Health IT in America.

Perl 5, I have been using it in Financial Services for the past 12 years. It is still a workhorse when it comes to reporting. Many large banks still use it, but most don&#x27;t advertise it. I used it at places like Intel back in 1999. It really is a versatile language.

Delphi<p>I&#x27;m in the process of &quot;inheriting&quot; a company whose sole product is a multi million LOC behemoth written in Delphi. The product itself is a highly customizeble&#x2F;parametrizeable control software for business processes&#x2F;alarm management build around a rule engine for rules drawn in a graphic editor.

Siemens Step5 (for maintaining an installed base of S5 PLCs - the most indestructible piece of computing hardware ever designed, IMHO.)<p>Also, some work in MPASM (Assembly for the Microchip PIC series of microcontrollers - same reason)<p>Edit: I am not sure just when S5 got introduced, but I&#x27;ve got installation media - on 5.25&quot; floppies - for CP&#x2F;M in my office. Made in West Germany.<p>That old.<p>Luckily, the IDE has also been ported to more contemporary operating systems.

lisp: It excels in &quot;key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension&quot;. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;james-iry.blogspot.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;05&#x2F;brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;james-iry.blogspot.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;05&#x2F;brief-incomplete-and-m...</a>

I will use Clipper open source alternative called Harbour.<p>I started using Clipper in 1986 and some of 1986 code still runs today. Clipper was a compiler for Ashton tate dbase II language.<p>Harbour now allows to run old code on windows, linux, Mac, Solaris and a bunch of other less common OSes, both in text mode or using some gui lib. It will also run on android and ios (using Qt).

Perl is one of those languages that nobody likes at my work, but that is impossible to get rid of.<p>Java is in the same boat, but at least it&#x27;s still marketable so engineers don&#x27;t mind working with it as much.

Perl 5, of course!<p>It&#x27;s an awesome language and both the language and the ecosystem is getting better and better all the time

I&#x27;ve been falling back in love with Forth, and specifically SwiftForth <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forth.com&#x2F;swiftforth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forth.com&#x2F;swiftforth&#x2F;</a> the full source code to everything comes with the paid version, and you can literally change everything. So much saner and cleaner in implementation than shitstorms like Go, GCC, LLVM, and Java.

&quot;classic&quot; asp. Still have some crappy legacy pdf generation code no one is willing to invest the time to rewrite into here. Fortunately that&#x27;s all of an update a year or so.

<i>uses PHP and JS</i><p>Those aren&#x27;t old enough to count, I guess<p><i>googles age of PHP</i><p>Holy crap! PHP is almost 23 years old. Probably still not considered &quot;old&quot; though...

Visual Foxpro. The application originated in 1986 or so and the original language was dBase II, but moved to FoxBase in 1987, and FoxPro&#x2F;Visual FoxPro over the next couple of decades.<p>I do as much in Python as I can justify, but I still have to work in VFP quite a bit. I personally have code from 1988 that&#x27;s still running in this application.<p>Sigh...

I still get paid to program in Pick Basic (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pick_operating_system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pick_operating_system</a>) which seems kind of unreal in 2017.

<p><pre><code> assembly apl (k4) forth (bootloader) snobol (spitbol) C (small subset) sh (Almquist-like) sed (not GNU) nawk (do not use added functions such as strftime) execlineb</code></pre>

As a hobby this year I&#x27;m beginning to experiment with mechanical computer designs, implemented in Lego Technics (yes, really). That&#x27;s going to involve looking back to Turing machines, Babbage&#x27;s difference engine, the Pascaline, and various other contraptions. I guess you could consider the means of encoding instructions for such machines to be programming languages, albeit very primitive ones.<p>Here&#x27;s a couple of machines that others have built:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FTSAiF9AHN4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FTSAiF9AHN4</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i_u3hpYMySk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i_u3hpYMySk</a>

Emacs Lisp. I want to port all my remaining sh awk and perl stuff to it, and I&#x27;ll havee some time to do that in the coming weeks.<p>Also, m4. I use it together with awk and bmake for a couple websites. I plan to port awk scripts to sth. else though, I keep forgetting awk.

BLISS. The system programming language for PDP and VAX computers from Digital Equipment Corporation. Think &quot;high-level assembly language&quot;. Powerful, elegant, simple, totally unforgiving. The world&#x27;s most powerful chainsaw, without a chain guard.

C++98 with a few C++11 features for work (our compiler is not really C++11 compliant at all, but it does have move semantics).<p>Ada for fun, though I&#x27;d say Ada 2012 is a bit like C++11 in terms of “basically a new language”. People do seem to have a perception of Ada as ‘old’, though I&#x27;m not sure why (it is, by my account, more ‘modern’ than, say, Go – actually, it&#x27;s not unlike Go with a nice generics system).

I really want to write something in 6502 assembly this year. I&#x27;ve read tutorials and played with it, but I&#x27;ve never used it to build a non-trivial program. I&#x27;ve also been wanting to build a NES emulator in common lisp, and this would be the perfect opportunity to pair the two projects.

ColdFusion&#x2F;CFML. All day, every day. Although a heavy dose of the newer hotness and the eventual migration of everything I work with off of it is in the works. Still enjoy working with it though. Very productive.

ITT: everyone realizes how old most widely deployed languages are.

What&#x27;s old? Anyway, I&#x27;ll be using:<p>Ruby, age 21. Web development, some text processing scripts. Design started on February 24, 1993 first release on December 21, 1995. [1]<p>Python, age 25, almost 26. Web development. Implementation started in December 1989. First release on February 1991. [2]<p>JavaScript, age 21. Web development. Designed and released in May 1995. [3] However if Ruby and Python are clearly the same languages they were 20+ years ago plus the natural evolutions, I don&#x27;t know if the JavaScript we&#x27;re using today has anything more that a resemblance with what it was back in 1995. After all we say we&#x27;re using bash (Bourne Again SHell, it couldn&#x27;t be more explicit) and not sh, speaking of which:<p>Bash, age 27. Scripting. Coding started on January 10, 1988 and released on June 8, 1989 [4] If we count the Bourne shell, that is from 1977 (age 39), coding started in 1976 [5]<p>Erlang, age 28. First prototypes running in 1988, work on BEAM started in 1992, in production as we know it in 1998 [6] Actually I&#x27;ll be using Elixir for backend coding. Sometimes all what an Elixir module does is calling Erlang modules so it&#x27;s handy to code that directly in Erlang. The Elixir compiler handles compiling and linking Erlang well.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ruby_(programming_language)#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ruby_(programming_language)#Hi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_Python" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_Python</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;community&#x2F;webed&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Short_History_of_JavaScript" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;community&#x2F;webed&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Short_History_of_J...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bash_(Unix_shell)#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bash_(Unix_shell)#History</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bourne_shell" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bourne_shell</a><p>[6] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Erlang_(programming_language)#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Erlang_(programming_language)#...</a><p>Considering that PHP, Java, C++, Perl are also in their 20s (and Objective-C is 30+), should we really call them old languages or old should that be reserved to something dating back to the 70s or the 60s? (C, COBOL, Fortran).

If you can remember the days when applications like Lotus 123 had menus at the bottom of the screen, and if you can imagine a macro scripting language in such an application, designed so that the menu structure directly defined the statements available in the language (e.g. file open standard-view &quot;c:\whatever.vw&quot;), and if you can imagine writing database manipulation routines in such a language (so that you must at all times be mindful of which view is in the foreground and what the currently selected record is, i.e. which record the user would be looking at if this task was being carried out by an actual user rather than a macro script), and if you can imagine a manufacturing company who implemented their own MRP system atop such software, then you have the beginnings of an idea of what I&#x27;ll be spending 2017 maintaining, and then <i>hopefully</i> decommissioning.<p>Here&#x27;s a mention of the software in question from the UK&#x27;s Unix User Group newsletter in 1995: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ukuug.org&#x2F;newsletter&#x2F;linux-newsletter&#x2F;linux@uk13&#x2F;smartw.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ukuug.org&#x2F;newsletter&#x2F;linux-newsletter&#x2F;linux@uk13...</a>

Ruby. Not Ruby+Rails, just pure Ruby. If you take away the Rails ecosystem, Ruby starts to feel like an old (but lovely) language. Many non-Rails gems (libraries) haven&#x27;t been updated for at least five years, if not ten -- so I end up rewriting a lot of stuff myself. I enjoy it, actually. Quite peaceful.

For the last 2.5 years I&#x27;ve been doing RPG - both the newer free form and older fixed. I can imagine I&#x27;ll be doing it a lot more within the next year also. A lot of people give it hate, but it&#x27;s a pretty simple language after you use it a lot.<p>It&#x27;s possible I will start to write C++ also.

I will certainly get more into C. Mainly because C is the biggest expansion in knowledge for someone who did 15y web dev on a high level. Secondly because I don&#x27;t want at all get more in touch with hype madness of JS and the likes. If we produce code at that rate the whole system will collapse within 5 years. At that time I should be fit enough to take a C senior position.

C. Like most infrastructure software - yes, even today - the codebase I work with (Gluster) is almost all C. Personally there are about a dozen languages I&#x27;d rather use, and would use if I were starting my own project, but this is the environment in which I get paid to solve interesting problems and the fact that it&#x27;s in C is just part of the package.

I&#x27;ve just being doing some work in B (C&#x27;s predecessor).<p>I suspect I may have the only B compiler in the world for the VideoCore IV processor.

I&#x27;m still using VB6 which was released in mid 1998 (19 years old in 2017)

Perl. A language that is still ahead of its time. I have a system for building RPMs of CPAN modules and their dependencies automatically.

IBM&#x27;s High-Level Assembler and JCL mostly.<p>I develop mainframe software.

Perl. MVC web app and TCP server stack for IoT devices, task queue, job scheduler and associated scripts.

My job is almost entirely Erlang, which is now 30 years old.

VHDL &amp; Verilog. 29 and 30 years old respectively, and while not really programming languages (they&#x27;re hardware description languages) but they&#x27;re used quite a bit. Any piece of equipment with an FPGA or CPLD inside (more things than you&#x27;d expect) and for prototyping systems before going to the expense of creating custom ICs. While they&#x27;re not as old as many of the other languages mentioned here they&#x27;re old enough, and I haven&#x27;t seen anyone else mentioning them.

Perl 5. Perl is awesome and versatile, and it&#x27;s the fastest scripting language in common usage.

Perl, sh, awk, sed, C, Fortran. There&#x27;s a freedom in not chasing down all the shiny new things.

- C! (I&#x27;m not using it at my current job but I&#x27;m just about to start a new job that&#x27;s mostly C) - Scheme! (Because I love it) - Bash&#x2F;Awk&#x2F;Perl&#x2F;Sed! (Because I use Arch for everything) - Java! (Because you can&#x27;t have everything in life)

Perl and Javascript.<p>I make web apps and started using Perl for cgi scripts back in `97 and still use it. Most of my app code now runs on the client side with Javascript so I don&#x27;t do much with perl anymore but I still use it for most everything on the backend.<p>Learning to code something with new or different languages is not something I do without good cause and&#x2F;or necessity. I haven&#x27;t ran into that much building web apps.

Writing a brand new Mac app for myself, using Objective-C instead of Swift. So far it&#x27;s a breeze. Yes I used Swift for a while, and it sure feels all academic and all, but meh, ObjC gets the job done just fine for me.

Visual Age Smalltalk and Cobol professionally. Company I work for tried 3 times to port to Java, plain JavaScript and now Angular. None can approach the sheer productivity and power of VA Smalltalk.<p>Pharo&#x2F;Dolphin Smalltalk, FreePascal, Racket&#x2F;Chez&#x2F;Guile&#x2F;Gambit(via LambdaNative) Scheme, Ada, Erlang, Forth(8th) for speculative&#x2F;personal projects.<p>Edit: Bits of LaTeX and groff here and there.

We still have a whole lot of FORTRAN77 around at my work that I will do some work on. Some of it is very close to FORTRAN-IV. These are Gen-IV nuclear reactor simulation codes written by Argonne National Lab and friends mostly in the 1960s-90s. They were validated against experimental facilities back then and therefore have a good pedigree. Since most of the experiments are no longer operational and not all the results and test conditions were well documented, it&#x27;s a challenge to update. We&#x27;ve upgraded some of the memory management stuff through the years at least and there&#x27;s more FORTRAN90 every day, which is a nice modern language from this perspective.<p>Thankfully we have written gobs of Python to do most of the data management, multiphysics coupling, multiobjective optimization, etc. so it&#x27;s really not too bad.

Erlang: immutability, pattern matching, quick compile times, the best implementations of QuickCheck, flexible distributed computing with async message passing.

I use APL as the sole language for my current job. Previous job was also APL. cumulative 4 years, and I&#x27;m under 30 yrs old, which is a bit of an oddity.

Perl, it is what we use for our ETL pipeline, and it works great for that.

I wrote scheme before it was cool (or at least something you sometimes read about on HN), and I will continue writing scheme when it stops being cool.

Smalltalk. It&#x27;s the &quot;secret weapon&quot; for a backend service. Allows fast mutability and is unbeatable at productivity and exploration.

Taking a deep look into Lazarus&#x2F;FreePascal&#x2F;Object Pascal this year (because I can still code Pascal &amp; VCL code in sleep nowadays). Want to see if it&#x27;s good enough to develop a simple macOS, Linux and Windows application at the same time.

Mostly, I&#x27;ll be writing a lot of fairly old fashioned C++ (my current project is yet to use a single smart pointer or lambda, lots of templates though) for high performance numerical work.<p>Also, I guess writing code in Python 2 is considered outdated nowadays, so that too. Plus the usual shell scripting (bash on Linux and simple batch files on Windows).<p>I do hope to avoid writing any new Fortran this year, so there&#x27;s that. Some of the less performance critical code will instead involve Julia, and I&#x27;ve been experimenting with D and Rust for fun. Not sure which category Java and C# fit in, but in all probability I&#x27;ll also use those at some point.<p>And finally, LaTeX. Very old and, unfortunately, indispensable.

Depends on your definition of &quot;old&quot; -- I&#x27;m using Bash, PHP, HTML, and JavaScript at work, which are all over 21 years old, but they don&#x27;t really feel that old (even PHP feels new and shiny thanks to the lovely Symfony framework).

Common Lisp for all of my hobby programming.<p>Edit: Well not all of it. I&#x27;m also learning rust and scheme in my free time.

Progress Openedge. I have never seen anyone on HN mentions it. The codebase is from the 90&#x27;. before that, I have worked with a codebase from the 80s, 10 years older than me.

OpenVMS BASIC and Progress OpenEdge. Really looking forward to the day I need to find a new job, and discovering how widely sought after <i>cough</i> my skillset is...

I want to use Pascal. It was awesome to work on Turbo Pascal while I was a student in 90s.

You didn&#x27;t really define &quot;old&quot; so I guess responses are going to be varied. Here is mine:<p>- Python (mentioning since it is over 20&#x2F;25 years old, though used a lot currently by many, of course).<p>- C (evergreen, for some uses, IMO)<p>- sh &#x2F; bash, with sed&#x2F;awk and friends (the common Unix command-line power tools (filters and others))<p>(Talking about both of the two points above mainly on Unix &#x2F; Linux, though both are quite useful on Windows too - sh &#x2F; bash and friends via cygwin, UWin, Ch and similar tools, and now &#x2F; after some time with the Windows Subsystem For Linux.)<p>- D (if it can be called an old one)<p>- Probably Pascal (via FreePascal), for small tools, for fun and personal dev use (e.g. utilities), on the side, to start with, maybe see if I can make something bigger and generally useful later (I have a somewhat long prior background in it - and in C). The compile times are fast, like D and Go, and executables are small, which are two of the reasons. Haven&#x27;t checked runtime performance of it much yet, but likely will not be shabby, to say the least. And last but not least (reason), because it is like C with some niceties added, which makes the code more human-readable and maintable (though I have no trouble understanding well-written C, my own or others&#x27;.) Also, modern Pascals like Delphi&#x27;s Object Pascal and Free Pascal are a far cry (much better) than the academic Pascal versions that were taught in universities years ago.<p>Edited to add (after seeing others mention it):<p>- SQL (had forgotten it because it is a bread-and-butter thing used in most of my projects, irrespective of other language used)

We still have one web-app written in perl, it&#x27;s based on the mojolicious web framework to keep it somewhat maintainable, the app used to be heavily tied to mod_perl1 which has thankfully been &#x27;modernised&#x27; to not use mod_perl1 or 2 and instead run with mojo+nginx. I expect this to continue being in service and maintained for another 1-2 years before being replaced by a python rewrite.

Prolog. - 1972.<p>SQL, bash,awk &amp; sed<p>&quot;PHP&quot;, It&#x27;s not old, but it&#x27;s not hip and plenty of people believe it deserves to die and has nothing to offer :-)

Lots and lots of SQL, which is now 40+ years old.

Lisp. That&#x27;s the only old language I use.

- python: my general purpose go-to language<p>- sh&#x2F;awk&#x2F;sed (I don&#x27;t really think of these as separate languages): mainly for scripting things that aren&#x27;t worth firing up python for or that are easier to script this way<p>- javascript: for web front ends<p>- html&#x2F;css: ditto<p>- possibly c: for particular things where I need more speed&#x2F;control over memory than python can provide

Java and C#, with a bit of (MS)SQL and ASP.NET and a smattering of VBA and ASP at work. None are what I would consider &quot;old&quot;.<p>For fun, though, there&#x27;s QB64&#x27;s implementation of QuickBasic. I also have my old 8088 up and running again, and GW-Basic and ASM there. I started with GW-Basic when I was about 4 years old on that old 8088. Two 5.25&quot; drives, no HD, 640k RAM and a &quot;Turbo&quot; button. What&#x27;s not to like?<p>Co-worker introduced me to Lazarus &#x2F; FreePascal a few weeks ago, and I decided to dust off my old pascal book from jr. high school and see what I can remember.<p>If I can find a use for it, I&#x27;d like to dust off and freshen up my Fortran77 memory. I know there have been updates, but Fortran77 has a little special place in my memory since that was the first language I got paid to know.<p>Then there&#x27;s COBOL. No idea why, but I want to revisit it and see if it is as bad as I remember.

Haskell, which is now a very mature language, over 26 years old.

C (ANSI or C99), C++ (C++11, some variation of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;bkaradzic&#x2F;2e39896bc7d8c34e042b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;bkaradzic&#x2F;2e39896bc7d8c34e042b</a>), and a bit of NASM ARM. I do GUI design, DSP, scientific simulations, and HPC.

IEC61131-3 family.. very widely used stuff, but definitely feels clunky and old. It&#x27;s not even fun-retro-old, it&#x27;s just old-old.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IEC_61131-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IEC_61131-3</a>

A business basic language called Providex (or PxPlus depending on the version).<p>There are several hundred thousand lines of the language in the main application where I work.<p>While there are definitely some major issues and pain points with it, it&#x27;s actually suprisingly powerful and the language itself is still being developed.<p>We&#x27;ve got a lot of things you wouldn&#x27;t think would be in a BASIC, like classes and object-oriented programming, a &quot;UI&quot; library that targets the web without any (tm) changes (in practice it misses that mark, but it&#x27;s still extremely useful), support for the big 3 platforms, and more.<p>I don&#x27;t deal too much with it though as most of my job is connecting new web stacks up with the pxplus backends.

Fortran, COBOL.<p>Though I don&#x27;t consider Fortran &quot;old&quot; as it has many shiny features.

Prolog is an old language from the future.

Visual FoxPro (VFP). Runs a number of legacy systems. But, still works quite well given a pretty flexible data access layer and access to any number of APIs over HTTP. Strong baked-in SQL support.

C - Wanted to get into some embedded programming. I was going to do some Rust for this, but I figure I might as well learn some C as well.<p>Bash - I already know some Bash, but I want to become a bash guru.

C++&#x2F;FORTRAN77 FORTRAN77 allows use of a code base that has the bugs beaten out of it years ago. Aerodynamics doesn&#x27;t change. Also older Engineers can still comfortably write new routines. C++ allows use of Qt4 and all that it offers. Graphics, networking, SQL, etc. Intel Linux compiler makes it simple to mix and match. Also to pass complex data structures back and forth. At one point we had the same programs compiled to run on SGI IRIX, Linux and Windows. #ifdef made it easy.

ActionScript 3<p>purpose: sysadmin, automation, server-side programming, daemon, shell &#x2F; interactive shell, command-line tools etc.<p>well ... it&#x27;s not that old (cerca 2006) but it is considered dead LOL

DataFlex - used for business apps, gets plenty of use in medical, accounting and banking and some web integrations.<p>Delphi - crossplatform development, tools<p>SQL - see above<p>C++&#x2F;C# - tools<p>bash - scripting, mostly for managing servers

COBOL, definitely COBOL

Depends on what you mean by &quot;using&quot;. Writing it, probably not so much. But a lot of the numerical things I use are written in Fortran (e.g. BLAS, Atlas). A lot of games I play probably have some hand optimized Assembly. And pretty much everything I touch is in some way backed by C. For natural language processing I&#x27;ve recently (re)discovered how useful PROLOG can be in some cases, and I may touch on that this year.

bash (27 years) - I tend to write for bash 3 and up, totally happy for my scripts to not work on Bourne shell<p>powershell (11 years) - basically just a better version of bash with &#x27;select&#x27; and &#x27;where&#x27; replacing scraping for text with grep&#x2F;sed&#x2F;awk<p>javascript (21 years) - finally ES5 and 6 have added some stupidly obvious things like multiline strings, array.includes(), destructuring, etc - it&#x27;s actually a pretty good language now.

I&#x27;ll be using QBasic to teach my kids programming. They both got Raspberry Pis for Christmas, which I preloaded with DosBox. This was always Plan A, but this article made me stop looking for a Plan B: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nicolasbize.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;30-years-later-qbasic-is-still-the-best&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nicolasbize.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;30-years-later-qbasic-is-sti...</a>

Haskell for an assorted collection of command line tools.

I&#x27;ll be using good old PHP

Emacs Lisp. In the past year, I finally switched from vim + a boatload of custom .vimrc stuff using tmux for running random repls to Spacemacs. For both contributing to Spacemacs as well as the few customizations I want, emacs lisp is a welcome departure from my usual vimL. At this point, I can&#x27;t imagine not talking to my editing environment as part of my daily workflow.

SquiLu (a fork from Squirrel) it has a good C&#x2F;C++ extension API (inherited from Lua), it can accept a big chunk of javascript as is and it can also accept a limited chunk of C&#x2F;C++, it&#x27;s fast enough and already has a good set of extensions.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mingodad&#x2F;squilu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mingodad&#x2F;squilu</a>

I use the Harbour Language which is for me a &#x27;Super C&#x27;. Massive flexibility and power. Right now, i&#x27;m using Harbour as a server lamguage to service my three web sites. Harbour has complete and built-in database power ( SQL, non-SQL, Comix, etc, etc). Take a peek at www.whosaway.com, a complete repository available gratis for world-wide programmers.

c++ 03. (This works well for me and never felt a need to switch to newer versions beyond using a few things here and there like auto, with new meaning. I have been using latest Visual Studio Express versions since 2010 so this &#x27;mix&#x27; has no problem. I don&#x27;t write code to be backward compatible compiler wise so on that count also its not a problem.)

For my day job, Python (it&#x27;s 25, that&#x27;s old) mostly. Primarily as the machine learning platform (all of it, from models to infrastructure) for the products my team develops for the company.<p>For my spare time work mostly Fortran, C and C++ qualify as old languages I&#x27;ll be using. These I use to dabble in research (physics) more for fun than anything else.

Depends what you mean by &quot;old&quot;. I&#x27;m mainly using C# and that is (somewhat surprisingly) 17 years old [1]. I still think of it as a shiny new thing.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;C_Sharp_(programming_language)#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;C_Sharp_(programming_language)...</a>

Ruby. I guess it&#x27;s still &quot;young&quot; as compared to many in here, but still, it suprises me to be this &quot;old&quot;.

I&#x27;m working for a perl-based UK startup. It&#x27;s the second perl startup I&#x27;ve worked at. Both have been very successful. The current one is about ten years old, and just starting to explore other languages now. Currently the whole infrastructure is perl-based, including public services, data-processing and inhouse tooling.

Standard ML. I develop proof assistants.

In the side and because a friend is in need, I would be using Basic (Alpha Micro&#x27;s Basic actually).

G-code (for 3D printing and milling). It&#x27;s about as old (within a few years) as COBOL and Fortran.

C&#x2F;C++ for the usual embedded and backend stuff. And a tiny bit of legit COBOL, because our orginization is married or perhaps chained to it. The COBOL code is mostly for UI work, sort of a VisualCOBOL, as well as legacy reports.<p>And of course the usual Linux scripters: bash, awk, sed, etc.

Probably an APL-like language like K+

I spent Xmas break learning exactly how much I could do with Bash! There&#x27;s no escaping an OS-solution to OS-problem when app-in-language-of-choice doesn&#x27;t have a standard library call for an OS-need. I may be learning AWK or C in the near future.

LaTeX. Still the best way to typeset documents, and likely to be so for the forseeable future.

Haha..beat this for esoteric: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dshanestewart.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;cadol-blog-overview-and-history.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dshanestewart.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;cadol-blog-overvie...</a>

Scheme. When I write code in my free time it&#x27;s always Scheme. I use it for web programming, game programming, systems programming, command line scripts, my package manager is written in it, my init system is written in it, etc. etc. etc.

It&#x27;s crazy that Python isn&#x27;t considered old. It&#x27;s been around for 25 years.

Active Server Pages (aka classic asp)<p>VBScript<p>JScript

When I write code for myself, it&#x27;s always Common Lisp -- even for stock trading.

<p><pre><code> - Perl - HTML (old?)</code></pre>

1) Lisp. Racket is the new old thing. But Clojure too. Lisp is the language I choose if I don&#x27;t know what the problem is beforehand. 2) Python. Numpy is unsurpassed in the data science world. 3) Shell programming

C

Java.

C++ - I&#x27;ve started at a new company whose main product consists of 2 million lines of C++&#x2F;MFC code. It&#x27;s a pain in the ass and I&#x27;m hating my life now, but it pays the bills...

Pascal and SQL on the desktop, C for embedded. I can read most other languages but as long as the Pascal compilers are being updated and actively supported I dont see any reason to move on

Another one for Perl. Web MVC, Shell scripts, and daemons galore :).

Prolog - it&#x27;s still as good as new, far as I&#x27;m concerned.

Common Lisp and Haskell. I&#x27;ve been using Haskell since near the start, and Common Lisp since then as well. However, recently I&#x27;ve been trying out Clojure for some things.

C for text processing, shell scripts for web scraping (wget, lynx, sed, ...). The elegant design of Unix tools still amaze me. I may do a little Classic ASP too.

- Plain old SQL<p>- Some MS-DOS Batch language<p>- Clarion<p>* Just installed a copy of the original Turbo Pascal on FreeDOS and looking forward to re-remembering my first &#x27;real&#x27; apps I wrote in it...

I don&#x27;t know if 21 years counts as old (I didn&#x27;t feel especially old when I was 21), but the first thing that comes to mind is JavaScript.

I&#x27;m using Pharo (Smalltalk) to build a web app.

I don&#x27;t know what the language of the year 2017 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.<p>We still use C++ and Fortran at our company.

- Javascript (199x) - Ruby (199x) - Python (199x)

SQL, c and c++(because I can&#x27;t do everything in rust yet) and python (because all of my employers think it&#x27;s a good idea)

Perl. If there&#x27;s ever anything I need to do on the command line, CPAN is the first place I look and it rarely lets me down.

(M)Awk. Still great for cleaning a lot of data.

I don&#x27;t relish the opportunity, but batch files, since they are the lowest common denominator for scripting on Windows.

C, bash, make, Haskell (Has it really been around that long already!?) (And C++ and Erlang depending on your cutoff date.)

BCPL. Because I&#x27;m restoring a Xerox Alto and it uses BCPL. Hopefully I&#x27;ll also get Smalltalk and Mesa working.

-Perl -Bash -C++

Lisp and C: for robotic control software.

Old programming languages don&#x27;t die, they just slowly fade away.<p>The oldest thing I periodically touch is VBA for Excel

- bash<p>- Python (esp. Django, which is for some reason uncool)<p>I also have this weird desire to jump back into C, just to refresh myself.

90% of the company website is still Classic ASP. So I will be using that until I can find a new job!

6502 assembly.<p>I just enjoy cracking old Apple ][ games in my spare time, it&#x27;s an incredibly rewarding challenge.

I&#x27;ll continue with JavaScript and C#... they are pretty old (and I&#x27;m not joking).

Visual Basic, for financial analysis. Though not sure VB 14 qualifies as &quot;old&quot;).

I&#x27;ll be using lots of Lua while I learn Machine Learning this year! Super exciting!

Objective-C on legacy project for AT&amp;T. But I feel ObjC won&#x27;t go anywhere.

Thankfully no, but a year ago I&#x27;d have to be working in Pascal, VB5, and VBA.

Powerbuilder!!!!<p>We have a bunch of mission critical desktop application that run on Powerbuilder.

Same as always, C &amp; Lisp.

I&#x27;m back to 100% assembly for a branch of the military, as a civilian.

Natural + Adabas on a mainframe for higher education administration, woot!

Haskell

Java on servers. Java on Android. iOS gets the new thing: Swift on iOS.

DCL[1]: scripting builds on a long obsolete version of OpenVMS which doesn&#x27;t even support command line piping, on half-baked Alpha servers loaded via 130mm magneto-optical drives over SCSI for hardware test programs written in...<p>ATLAS[2]: an utterly repulsive, &quot;self-documenting&quot; language designed specifically for test applications, which has somehow managed to outlive the demise of its guiding IEEE standards committee to the dismay of many a aspiring young engineer. Paradigms include 20+ token statements as a <i>sensible</i> method to toggle a switch best described as <i>abusive</i> by certain alumni of aforementioned committee; proliferation of subsets which aren&#x27;t even notionally interoperable because it makes people feel special; and nerfing canonical features related to trivial GPIO control only to adopt a proprietary language such as...<p>L200[3]: because languages are always fun when comma delimiters are strictly optional most of the time, and it&#x27;s easier to metaprogram an application than to actually write it. Build&#x2F;runtime&#x2F;debug environment is also fun when it&#x27;s technically an obsolete filesystem emulator executed by an obsolete OS running on an obsolete hardware architecture whose performance[4] pales in comparison to a 1st generation RPi.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DIGITAL_Command_Language" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DIGITAL_Command_Language</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Abbreviated_Test_Language_for_All_Systems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Abbreviated_Test_Language_for_...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Teradyne" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Teradyne</a><p>[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;303&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;303&#x2F;</a>

Haskell, late 80s. I hear wine gets better with age like Haskell.

C. C++. Python. sh. Awk.

Basic. Specifically BASIS&#x27;s BBx (Business Basic extended).

I use Ada for Data Structures class, I think that counts?

Java, C#, C++, SQL, and if I cannot avoid it, JavaScript.

Fortran (1956), Haskell (1989), C (1969), myself.

vba&#x2F;excel&#x2F;sql for reporting automation.

CA-Visual Objects. For a Win32 Application.

Visual Basic 6 Tons of legacy integration.

C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Java&#x2F;C#&#x2F;Assembly

C &amp; assembly, bit of bash scripting.

SQL, sh, awk, and javascript (cscript).

They all are &quot;old&quot;. If it&#x27;s new it&#x27;s probably some wired buggy and failing combination of C Lisp and Forth.

Common Lisp.

Delphi and C

Lisp, C, .... Not Fortran though

C, LISP, Mathematica (?), ABAP

ES6<p>Everybody is es7 and es latest. I feel old.

Delphi (may quit), Perl, Tcl!

DOS command line batch files

C

ruby, java, javascript are all &#x27;old&#x27; at this point

Does C count?<p>C, ksh<p>For one of the retailer&#x27;s POS.

Go. Eight years old.

Learning C this year

bash, sed &amp; yml:<p>it&#x27;s crazy how far those will get you...

Java and Python

java and python

mostly C here

Perl 5 Baby!

Visual basic

Python.

LiveCode.

Vb6

Make.

possibly datalog

Haskell is pretty old and I&#x27;m gonna use it until Idris is production-ready

VBA (Visual Basic for Application).<p>Can&#x27;t seem to ever lose it. Financial Institutions -- think Hedge Funds, Banks, Brokerages) -- are still drowning in bloated complex Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with 1000s of lines of hard-to-maintain-and-source-control VBA code.

vb6 for a desktop application