Favorite programming language(s)?

[blackbird9]

If I had to limit my choice to the languages listed in The University of Cambridge's Eureka magazine, on page 21, Volume 29, it lists the SPUDSAC I computer. There it states: "Most programmingis done in Spudsac Tomatocode, which is similar to ordinary language."

That ranks up there with BEDSOCS (a 1970's simulation language that ran on an HP 2100).

Implementation of BEDSOCS: an Interactive Simulation Language

Abstract. BEDSOCS, an interactive digital computer language that is designed to allow the easy solution of problems described by ordinary differential equa

academic.oup.com

It appears that there was a later version written in C that ran on PDP11:

The writing and implementation of a Portable version of BEDSOCS by Gary Heywood | Open Library

The writing and implementation of a Portable version of BEDSOCS by Gary Heywood, 1982 edition, in English

openlibrary.org

 

[zirias@]

First, OO and functional are almost orthogonal concepts, you can perfectly combine them. Nobody ever said OO means mutable objects, for example.

Second, the "classic" OO (which combines object-orientation with a procedural paradigm) already allows to structure your code quite nicely, while not having to abstract from the real machine "too much". You can do OOP in machine code / assembly, if you like. You won't ever find a good way to do functional programming in machine code.

Disclaimer: No judgement whatsoever involved here.

 

[cracauer@]

I thought OO was the whole raison d'etre of C++; remember "C with classes?" So now it's a functional programming language?

Early C++ where you had to use OO to even do collections was absolutely terrible. Generic programming with templates is much better.

Templates are a purely functional programming language (at compile time), one where there is just one type - types. Still, they are the best you got in C++ to get work done safely.

That is why Lisp is so much better - you have a real, complete language at compile time - Lisp.

 

[Paul Floyd]

Would be interesting to see examples where "casting to/from void * is required in C++.

Type erasure. You don't want your template widget to get instantiated into a different type for every thing that it handles, so you store a `void*`. Then when you need to use it you cast it back. This should be safe as it's all done by the compiler which has all of the type information.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

blackbird9 It is but Djikstra thought OO was dumb (or words to that effect).

 

[Paul Floyd]

From type erasure to machine code. I did a very small amount of 6502 on my VIC-20. At university it was Z80 and 6809. As an intern at IBM, 80286 and the IBM proprietary GPU in their ImageAdapter/2 (that was nice). Then not that much asm for quite a long time. In the past few years working on Valgrind I've needed to write and above all read a lot of amd64, x86 and arm64 machine code and a bit of PPC. Haven't bothered much with MIPS. Looking on the horizon is RISC-V.

 

[michael_hackson]

I get most satisfaction by writing in C. Bettering up C++ for graphics programming and for web development I like the direction that JS is going in, especially addition of TypeScript.
Other languages I have looked into hasn't felt right for me in their syntax. I need some level/extent of written code to memorize. Wanted to look into Lua at one point but haven't taken time for it yet. I focus on getting fully customized for C++ and JS before looking into any new.

 

[rbranco]

Python, Golang, C.

 

[bgavin]

I still write a whole lot of tools for Win32 with Delphi, and even more to interact with Excel using VBA.
Coding is a perishable skill, but I still have my ASM and other libraries.
Even though heavily commented and structured, I read one app I wrote in ASM, scratched my head and wondered WTF was I thinking???