Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/01/which-coding-language-should-y.html
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What’s a “coding language”?
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FORTRAN.
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INTERCAL
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BASIC. In a Casio PB-100. Where you had to write “programs” using only 544 bytes of memory.
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That wouldn’t be a bad choice - I think there’s still a lot of legacy programs to be maintained and Fortran programmers are not very common.
Some truly amazing (and open-source) engineering software still uses Fortran:
https://www.code-aster.org/
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COBOL is still used by banks, the VA (specifically payroll) and the social security administration. Crazy that so much critical data is now being maintained by fewer and fewer people.
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Pascal
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A post where I pointed out that they don’t say when this instructional material was generated, and that it may all be out of date - was deleted.
They notified me that they considered my post an “attack” - but didn’t explain why they don’t give the copyright date of products like this. Instead, the responder said that they don’t have space to tell you everything about the products, and that you can learn all you need about PHP from a five year old manual. I don’t know PHP, but I do know from my career as a programmer that languages go through significant waves of change as technology changes, and five years can matter a lot. Web programming in particular moves rapidly.
In a book store, you can just open a manual and see how old it is. Since you can’t do that here, they should tell you up front how old the stuff is. That’s considered necessary information by professionals. You may still buy an older manual if you know that there have not been significant changes since it was published (and you can look on Wikipedia or elsewhere for that info), but it should be an informed choice.
Let’s see if this post stays or gets deleted.
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JavaScript is not Java.
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I remember when some people in Byte wanted an IBM Selectric typeball for APL, figuring if they got X number of people it would cost a reasonable Y amount per ball.
That indicated to me that APL was a “hot” language, though I’ve later read it was “easy to code, hard to read” or something like that.
Ted Nelson’s “Computer Dream” may have mentioned APL, it mentioned some odd languages like Trac, complete with the cooyright synbol.
I thought we used to call these “programming languages”. “Coding” suggests not thinking about how to do something, just take an idea from someone else and implement it. Or maybe a markup “language” to turn text into a web page.
The term seems to be a recent wave, as if proficiency in a language is the same whether programming or speaking, especially for kids.
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Where’s my Brainfuck tutorial?
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PL/1
(A language name too short to post);
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look up “whitespace”. Its the best programming language and it’s object oriented so you know its good, everything oop is always the best thing ever and everything else in the entirety of programming is to be ignored.
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My thoughts exactly.
As the old saying goes, “learn FORTRAN in the coding language of the day”
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The people with whom I share an office still write/maintain a FORTRAN program.
I cut my proverbial teeth on that*, except that I don’t actually write code. That class was 26 years ago and I assume it was already old, even then. (The textbook was called “Turbo Pascal” which we weren’t actually using.)
*Upon further reflection, the “eureka!” moment came when I wrote out a nested If statement for Lotus 1-2-3; that was for the “Intro to Computers” class that was the prerequisite for Pascal.
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25 posts were split to a new topic: Computer programming for fun and profit
Some great discussion here. I’m moving it to a community thread so it can continue after this post auto-closes.
