Ask HN: Which “old” programming language(s) you still use in your $DAYJOB?

Fortran is quite heavily used in computational science domain. Both the "old" (F66, F77, F90) and the new modern F2003, F2008, F2018. and Yes, (modern) Fortran feeds my family daily (along with many other computational tools and skills). Modern Fortran is a bliss. The parallel features of it are quite advanced comparable to advanced modern MPI capabilities, yet with an extremely intuitive and simple "Coarray" syntax. It is a fully vectorized, parallel shared and distributed, array-oriented, also Object-Oriented, language. It has influenced and shaped the syntax of MATLAB, Python, R, even C++ numerical libraries by its simple powerful high-level array-syntax.

Aren't almost all of them old at this point? The numbers of people using what most people would count as new is pretty small percentage wise.

.NET Compact Framework 3.5. Might not sound that old, but it's only supported in Visual Studio 2008. Microsoft keeps trying to kill it off, but the manufacturer I support is still shipping products using it.

Maybe I'll come off as a youngin' with this one, but PHP. I honestly really enjoy it. There are some quirks and syntax I don't particularly like, but overall, using PHP in a server setting isn't bad at all. I always heard people talk down on it in college, but those people probably never used it either. PHP by day and Rust by night is a nice combo honestly. Pretty different, but it gives some variety.

The oldest stuff I use regularly at work would be Bash, Java, and Groovy. And then one specific utility stands out as something I use a lot, despite its age: sed. I use sed all over the place in scripts to inject values into config files as part of scripts.

SQL, hands down

Through 2015 I used Fortran to develop trading strategies for a fund, and since then I have developed strategies for my personal account. I used to use g95 and now use the gfortran compiler. Fortran 90 and later versions (the latest standard is F2018) have modern features, including array operations like Matlab or NumPy. For plotting I wrote some subroutines that called gnuplot. Fortran does not have libraries to download financial data like Python or R, but once you have the data, coding is straightforward and the programs are fast.

C and Bash. I absolutely love and and hope to be able to continue using them long-term. Performance is key to what we do. Sometimes we even need to look at the code generated by the compiler, so some assembly knowledge is required too.<p>(although sometimes I prefer C++, and learning Rust is still on my TODO list)

Not a language per se, but I&#x27;m on a Qt based distro this summer, and I was pleasantly surprised to see what&#x27;s new in 6.0. Qt is ancient, ubiquitous. We use it everyday without realizing it. But now it&#x27;s got its own IDE, UI editor. And supports a Vulkan rendering backend ;)

Until recently wrote a lot of Perl 5 (still very popular in bioinfomatics).

SQL, Oracle PL&#x2F;SQL, bash&#x2F;ksh<p>Previous jobs, not so long ago: Fortran, C, BASIC

VBA, VBScript, VB6, VB.NET<p>Maybe not “old” but most of those are solid legacy.

The usual stuff (SQL, ksh, etc) and COBOL.

i honestly like batch and bash files haha