Computer Languages you've used (and loved)

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Who are these "expert programmers"?

You’ll know them when you see them 😂.

Array accessing is NOT user pointer/address arithmetic

In C it most definitely is. A[B] is by definition just another way of spelling
*((A)+(B)), which is clearly pointer arithmetic.

Worry about improving performance after it's working.

For many applications performance is part of the definition of working, e.g. hard real-time control.

Unless you are coding 200 Ms /s DSP or a tiny micro controller managing 1MHz signals, performance is the last thing to worry about.

Precisely my point- sometimes you *are* writing high speed DSP code or using tiny embedded processors (or kernel code, or memory management code, or any of a gazillion other areas where pointer arithmetic is useful).

What’s normal in one field isn’t necessarily so in others.

[SteveEisenberg]

Loved is not the same as produced the fastest and most stable software. Allowing that:

Applesoft Basic (as a hobbyist)
VB4, VB5, and VB6 (as a paid* developer)
Transact-SQL

Languages that I have used a lot and did not love so much include COBOL and VB.NET (I worked in a shop that was heavily Basic oriented).

_____________
* I could say professional, but I always felt I was a paid amateur (not meant as an self-insult, just a statement).

[Solitaire1]

There's only three languages that I've enjoyed writing in are:

• Basic
• Basic HTML
• Palm E-Book Format

With Basic I got good enough at it to single-handedly write an entire database program to track scheduled employee absences, and dealt with issues like coming up with a way to update a suspense date that is a certain number of workdays in the future (disregarding weekends). I designed it so that the first time you entered a date it would ask you what was the date that is 3 days in the future, and would use that date when I updated future scheduled employee absences.

With Basic HTML, and the Palm E-Book Format, I liked the simplicity of the formats. The formatting was easy to work with and reliable.

[DNSB]

A lot of my early programming was assembler code. I tried various Basics and BDS C plus SAM76, Pascal, APL, COBOL, FORTRAN, WATFOR, WATFIV, etc. I'm now mostly using C/C++, Python and The only for pay programming I did was assembler for building control systems where you had to squeeze every bit of performance out of a minimal amount of ROM and RAM while generating reliable code.

[Quoth]

I did like Forth, VB6, Modula-2 and JAL (PIC 16 & 18), but most of my paid programming jobs were in C++, C, Assembler (8051, 78HC11, Z80) and Java. The VB.net was a huge let down and inferior to C# or VB5, never mind VB6.

I don't count the paid work on web servers, SQL etc as actual programming as such. Never liked it anyway.

[PocketBookFan1]

High School:
Python
Tried C++(did not like it)
Neutral towards C
Post-High School before College:
C#(C Sharp)

[Tarana]

College only
Pascal - not that useful but helpful in learning how computers are programmed
Basic - still use to program Excel spreadsheets.

[slm]

I find it interesting that no one mentioned Forth. I liked it better than C but I don't think I ever got project in Forth working correctly.
My preferred language were
1. C -- I never write in it but the original K&R is by far the best language instruction book I've ever read.
2. BASIC--because it works and doesn't require much thought.
3. Javascript--because it also works and is much more capable than BASIC.
4. COBOL because I did my first paid-for projects in it.

IBM taught me 360 Assembler many many years ago and I never completed a project in it, but it helped a lot in understanding what all those other languages are actually doing.

[jbjb]

I've been doing some work in Rust recently, and it's rapidly becoming one of my favourite languages. Expressive and fast (both to write and to execute), with some really nice ideas on memory ownership and safety.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by slm

. . .
IBM taught me 360 Assembler many many years ago and I never completed a project in it, but it helped a lot in understanding what all those other languages are actually doing.

You woke up a sleeping 8K memory chip

In the early '70s I developed and maintained an income tax calculation function that could be used by a payroll system that was written in RPG and ran on an IBM System 3. At the time income tax was calculated using a (bracket creep free) polynomial equation … I wrote that in Assembler.

About the same time I also came close to working on an IBM System 7 (early RISC) - but the client went for RSX-11 on a PDP 11.

Originally Posted by PocketBookFan1

High School:
C#(C Sharp)

I still think of C# as C Crunch.

BR

[poohbear_nc]

I started writing programs back in the days of Pascal and COBOL - but my all time favorite was C - its logic & structure synced with my brain seamlessly - but I can still remember the week from hell when I wrote my first C program that froze every time - and how long it took to find the missing ";"

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by slm

I find it interesting that no one mentioned Forth. I liked it better than C but I don't think I ever got project in Forth working correctly.

One friend and I did some stuff for his astronomy project in Forth. Wrote and tested the programs on my CP/M machine and then he carted them over to the observatory to see how they worked in real life. Reminded me so much of my old HP-45.

[PeterT]

To this day I still remember a line of code from an internal chargeback program. The line of Cobol was CALL CHINESE USING JUNK. Chinese was written in 370 Assembler and I believe it was doing bit manipulation on Junk which was a floating point number.

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[BetterRed]

Which bit of the float, mantissa or exponent And I assume the chargeback fee was billed in junk bonds.

[PeterT]

Unfortunately that detail I don't remember

I still think the main program was MH6012AA and was part of the data centers charge back to internal departments using SMF data.

As a SPROG one got to play with many things

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