Everything Else

So any pair will do? Pair programming FTW!!!

I only speak Australian, lucky for me its not in Austrian.

R.

Any pair in a storm

If you have two apples, are they a pair?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PearPC

R.

http://minx.cc/?blog=86&post=285493#c4542723

Sorry. I'd no intention to chide you in any way. Of course, you're right. I only wanted to counter the wide-spread mischaracterization of Lisp being called a *functional* language. Lisp is no more functional than Perl is...

Actually, there's also the performance myth: low-level languages are more efficient than Lisp. In fact, C is actually at a performance disadvantage to Lisp.

Back on-topic:

Ada.

It's not the most common or versatile language (I don't see anyone writing games in it) but by Jove, it is great at what it does. Mainly aimed at multithreaded real-time applications. Brilliant stuff.

A F-111 fighter jet simulator used Ada in (at least) the avionics buses. That is the only time I've seen outside of university. A lot of the recent military stuff I've heard about is C and assembler on very modern embedded CPUs. I've never really gotten into Ada. But there is a GNU Ada in nekoware.

R.

I believe most of our air traffic control system software is written in Ada (here in the US). Seen several job postings for Ada programming in that space, even recently with the software modernization program.

Emphasis on theoretically! In practice that's irrelevant. I mean do you really want to write GUI apps or a data base engine in brainf**k?



Right but it goes much further than that. Languages are bound to platforms and types of tasks a lot more than people realize because most people only have experience with one platform or a bunch of platforms that are essentially very similar from the programmer's point of view. Even if a language runs on multiple platforms and OS it is often more useful on some combinations of platforms and OS than others, mostly because the type of work across those platforms and OS differs so much.



Nope and I dispute those languages are the currrent lingua franca of programming unless you are talking about *NIX based computing. In my work nobody uses those except maybe for a little of the UI and on the platform I work with nobody use those languages even for applications since domain specific languages and libraries were available before C and are now entrenched and C/C++ are still not supported very well.



I know a bunch of languages that aren't used very much now but my favorite is z/Arch assembler. Assembler is bound very much to an OS *and* the hardware platform. So I'm looking for a platform I like and an OS I like and a language I like and I haven't found the sweet spot yet (other than the one I already work on). That should be a different spin on your question, since I assume everyone else here knows and loves UNIX and it's just a matter of what language that's useful on UNIX would you like to learn. Sigh, you guys have it so easy

that's right, but when you consider the prevalence of unix-based systems in the whole world of computing, that's basically a logical conclusion to make. Of course there are still isolated niches like IBM Mainframes and they do important business and they do a whole lot of business transactions, by far the largest part of serious computation takes place on somehow unix-like systems

I would point out that C is used on very many *non* UNIX/POSIX systems. It is used in embedded systems with no OS at all, all versions of windows including Windows CE etc, BeOS, OS/2, DOS, Amiga/OS, PalmOS, macintosh classic and can be used on many IBM systems including OS/400 etc.

It's rather like C is the Cheddar in Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch.

No doubt C is found many places. But so are assembly and Java. Historically there was much more assembly running on DOS than C, all the Borland stuff was written in assembly. All the platforms you mentioned except for Windows/CE and OS/400 (hasn't been called that for years, it's now iOS or something like that) are dead so that doesn't really count for much and even on OS/400 C accounted for what, 1% of all code? RPG was probably 75% and COBOL and Java the rest. Java is more prevalent on mobile, probably 95% of all phones especially since the last major C++ phone platform (Nokia) went away and even in embedded Java has displaced C, and C will never regain the popularity it had there. This has nothing to do with C or Java being good or bad, it's just how it is. I realize when you work with *NIX or desktop stuff you think C is all there is. I'm telling you that is an incorrect view.

I wasn't aware that the iPhone and iPad used Java. It's counted as optional for Lion.

if you count cheap featurephones with JavaME, then almost all phones ship with java. when you consider how many of these featurephones actually run some form of application, JavaME is alive and kicking just like TurboPascal...
iOS and WP7 don't involve Java, but Android and the old Blackberry-OS are thoroughly based on it, so it's a mixed bag...important yes, 95% no

No, but playing with Unlambda is great fun still [I've written interpreters in ML, Haskell and Hope, as well]

I beg to differ. AFAIK, most open source code available today is written in C/C++ [q.v. SourceForge]. With a decent ANSI C compiler you can get it running on quite a few platforms, not just on *NIX based boxes. I gave up programming Windows in the early '80. z/Arch assembler source is rather rare today - I don't think too many care about it anyhow. And Java is junk.

PS: As you are obviously not really friendly with regards to Unix, I sure hope you have the UNIX Barf Bag at hand, now do you?

Oskar, you don't have to defend that position - the first page, 3rd post of this topic, there link to current rankings of languages used by some survey. I suggest you gave up Windows Programming in the early 90s when Windows3.1 came out, 1980s was DOS and was the first widespread available release... and yes, Java is junk. "Your code is bad, it crashes the JVM..." "Oh really, I have to code in such a way that I have protect the infrastructure from itself..?? oh wow.. what a step forward". If crashing JVMs is not a problem explain products like Azul systems ZingJVM (also junk, IMHO).

R.

Thanks, Pymble. But, no, I'd started Windows Programming with 3.0 [although at that time Windows had already existed for a couple of years on the fringe of the DOS world]...

I started Windows 1.0 programming in 1987 with Microsoft C 3.0.

Now we're back to those tiled windows with Metro.