What are your least/most favorite programming languages?

[ian turner]

Think you're getting confused. Ada wasn't released until 83 and took a while to get full working compilers which had to be certified officially to be used, GEC software would have been incapable of that. Coral-66 possibly which was the militarys previous attempt at an all in one fiasco er language and was being used on the 4190s. If one wants to spin out the Ada Lovelace line then Babbage as that was the assembler on GEC machines. But definitely not ADA.
The 4080 was GECs oldest computer.
GEC computers were a piece of junk. The only market they had was GEC companies. Worked for one of them where they were bidding for American projects where DEC was the obvious machine of choice as there was no service support in the US for GEC computers. The Nimrod Radar project was lost because they were using GEC computers.
They claimed GEC computers were the fastest but they had a crap OS , were an abomination to develop for. One project had 12mb exchangable winchesters where it took 6 hours to format a disk and they didn't trust the formatting so did a double format that ran overnight !!!!

 

[twowheelsgood]

Well not for the first time I'm totally the opposite to everyone else.

Perl regex is just so powerful and does is one statement what whole programs full of text-parsing tedium does, then there's the way you can so easily use hashes, list processing and assignment, then there are the sort with <=> and cmp functions. Finally learn OO programming in Perl and you completely understand how a OO actually works, because you can make or break the rules as you please (OK requires discipline on your part).

For smugness, when working with people with skills in other languages, it's great fun to replace their 50 lines of sledgehammer coding with a line or two of Perl.

For speed of development and gluing things together absolutely nothing comes close to Perl. Sure, these days you wouldn't develop an enterprise level solution (like most of the web was Perl/CGI in the early days) in it but boy when you need to put together some tools in a development environment it's awesome. I appreciate the universality and scalability with JAVA but goodness doesn't it feel clunky, crude and slow at times.

I think it's a cultural thing JAVA is very proscriptive, design techniques spit out a template and the programmer mechanically fills in the gaps, Perl can of course work the same way but the meat on the bones can be an art form.

 

[Carwash]

Well not for the first time I'm totally the opposite to everyone else.

Not everyone, friend.

 

[twowheelsgood]

Lol, a fellow traveller. Perl is odd because it's like learning a spoken or written language, you can construct sentences in so many different ways.

It's also one where the sophistication of your grammar and vocabulary increase over time. I look back on my early programs and they are contructed like C and look like baby-talk to me today.

Of course this isn't a good thing as generic easily outsourceable code is the order of the day and the very last thing you want is anything approaching flair or a style.

 

[Danny]

We used Ada when I worked at a company that developed fuel and engine control systems for aircraft systems. The code had to fully predictable, i.e. it had to be possible to track through each path through each module. Therefore, we weren't allowed to use its instantiation, tasking or interrupt and exception handling features. We might as well have used Pascal

I learnt to programme in Ada and found it much easier than C.

Does anyone still use Ada or Pascal these days?

 

[ian turner]

I learnt to programme in Ada and found it much easier than C.

Does anyone still use Ada or Pascal these days?

Military and safety systems. Or at least Rolls Royce were still using it. The engines that went into the A380 were probably tested with software written in ADA so that doesn't say much for it .

What do you call a horse designed by the military ? Ada. I also experienced Coral 66 which was their previous effort and basically took all the worst features of existing languages.

Fortunately they let the requirement for ADA use on military systems slide as it was unsustainable as there were very few ada compilers (the open source GNU compiler was considered the best which doesn't say a lot for the rest given the requirements for rigorous testing and licencing) and very few ada programmers.

I seem to remember that on military projects they had to remove all dynamic memory allocation and have static declarations of data objects in sufficient quantity to meet the maximum requirement.
Mind you I also remember various idiotic design practices that made the insistance on this a joke anyway.

Hmm the "I used to patch the boot program into a 4080" post has been deleted making my previous post look out of place

 

[buddha]

6502 assembly is the dog's danglies!