What dead languages do you know?

[carrja99]

Recently, we were asked if we could look at a TV station website owned by a parent company that we did a site for one of their newspapers and form a quote.

Oddly enough, this site used a pre-processing language I had never heard of before... Spinnaker. Google searches turned up basically nothing, all I could find was an old usenet posting from 96 talking about how cool it was and telling people they should check out the website for it (which is now dead).

This language used odd coldfusion like tags like <$if> or <$while> and used a backend database called SpinDB (which was really a paradox database). After much confusion I contacted the author of the language, who was rather suprised there were sites out there still using it since his company had quit developing it years ago. After a day though, learned all the syntax and structure, and was able to import the database to MySQL with no problems. Guess like COBOL or PASCAL, comes in handy to know when you have companies looking to modernize their legacy software. :D

So, what dead languages do you know?

[mrBen]

I did Pascal at college.

Plus, various variants of Basic (QBasic, BBC Basic, Amstrad Basic, Spectrum Basic), and Glasgow Uni did (and I think still do) Ada95 as part of their course (not exactly dead, but not exactly common either).

[Pafnoutios]

I did Pascal in high school and GW-BASIC and QBasic before then.
I think Ada is still used in military vehicles.

[hlrguy]

TI-99/4A: Basic and Assembler
Commodore SuperPet: Extended Basic

Of course, I use my Fortran, Pascal and 8086 Assembler programming skills all the time. :D

hlrguy

[Icarus]

Commodore64 BASIC
QBASIC
COBOL

Not much use for any of those these days, there was a rush in 1999-2000 for COBOL programmers but I missed that boat :(

[carrja99]

Originally posted by mahdi
Commodore64 BASIC
QBASIC
COBOL

Not much use for any of those these days, there was a rush in 1999-2000 for COBOL programmers but I missed that boat :(

Each and every year, a major food distributor with their HQ around here shows up at the career fair at the Uni looking for COBOL programmers. In fact, all 5 years I've been here, they've been pimping their COBOL job. Oddly enough, the university discontinued teaching COBOL back in 92.

You'd think they'd get it by now?:confused:

[blobaugh]

This ones not really dead, but it should be

Visual Basic

[bwkaz]

MBASIC (for CP/M: yeah, exactly)

TI BASIC (never learned the assembly though)

Emacs Lisp... oh, wait, never mind. Just because I don't like Emacs doesn't mean nobody uses it... :D

[jrbishop79]

Originally posted by mahdi
Commodore64 BASIC
QBASIC
COBOL

Not much use for any of those these days, there was a rush in 1999-2000 for COBOL programmers but I missed that boat :(

my dad programs in COBOL to this very day.... There's a technical school near me that still teaches it....

[tmcG]

The only programming I have done on non-Intel based PCs has been with the AMOS language on the Commodore Amiga 500.

I still have my Amiga and am looking to run NetBSD on it soon (if I can find a hard disk for it somewhere!:))

[phlipant]

i was going to say pascal, but i think ada is a little deader.

not by much though.:D

[michaelk]

PASCAL? I have both Delphi and Kylix.

How about ALGOL, SNOBOL, SAS, SPSS, PL/1 or PL/C. But don't ask me if I remember how to progam using any of them anymore.

[IsaacKuo]

Yeah, Pascal isn't really dead, nor is BASIC. While Visual BASIC is pretty far evolved from pre-OO BASIC, XBase derived Visual Foxpro still has current development clinging onward in an old fashioned non-OO style.

COBOL, of course, is still around, as is Fortran.

I can't think of any computer language which once had a large following which is really dead. If there are still a large number of legacy apps being maintained/expanded/updated in a particular language, I wouldn't consider it "dead".

Maybe Rexx?

[elderdays]

Latin :D

[bs_texas]

I worked with APL at IBM back in the '80's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_programming_language
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/cgi-bin/vuImag3.pl?i=149
I wouldn't say that I still know it, however.

[MartinB]

C64 BASIC
Easy-AMOS (A BASIC-like Amiga 500 language used primarily for developing games - Supposed to be the easy (i.e. cut down) version of the language)
QBASIC
FreeScape II (Well, this is kind of a programming language. It was a BASIC-like scripting language for a program called 3D Construction Kit for doing things such as object movement, collision / shot detection and reaction)
Dark BASIC (A proprietry games development language for Windows. Well, I don't think this one is quite dead yet - It was never really alive to begin with though)
Pascal (I didn't really think Pascal was dead, but seeing as people mentioned it, I figured I might as well do too)

[MartinB]

I don't know if this one counts, I'd never heard of it before and it never really seemed to be alive to begin with:

Oolong JAVA Assembly - It's like writing Assembly, only without the convenience of having direct access and manipulation of the memory! Plus, you also get the convenience of being forced in true JAVA style to make everything object oriented! Yes, you read that correctly - Object Oriented Assembly! And to top it all off, your programs still run much slower than their C equivilants!

They made us learn this stuff for the "Low Level Programming" module at my university this semester. I never even want to think about it again.

[madkid]

I remember from Romania this wierd computer thing, you had to put in sheets of paper, and it put holes in it. Don't ask me what it was called, but I think that's how programing started.......

[bwkaz]

Uh, those would be punched cards. Not a language per se, but still pretty dead, what with the keyboard and screen and text editors and all. ;)

[hammer123]

My friend knows a programming language he made up after taking his class in basic

He thinks its really great

It has line numbers and you use goto statements instead of functions because functions make no sense to him while goto line 10 does

he does not have to worry about forgetting to use the shift key because its not case sensitive

no more of those symbols he finds annoying like ; : ( ) [ ] { } because it is a verbose language without loops or compound expressions like for (i =0 ; i ==100; i++)

of course with the line numbers you can't add a single line above a line that has been called so i helped him come up with an idea for a text editor that puts 50 lines of blank space between each line of typed commands but it displays them like they were right next to each other. The thinking is that when goto reaches a blank line it will goto the next one so when you add a line just add it as far away as possible from other lines. Of course deleted lines were an issue if you referenced a line below so we came up with the idea of a text editor that would keep track of goto references and make a popup whenever a referenced line's number was changed

he thinks its useful for making simple programs. what he showed me with it was a 5 line program that printed "good job" because he made X=1 and X=1 tested true

I assure you that whatever language the text editor is written in it will not be this version of basic

I can't say i actually know this version of basic too well because the guy does not know order of operations so the operators usage can morph unpredictably

my first language ever was qbasic though

[Gogeta_44]

i use rapidq (a not quite visual basic clone) and I havent seen an update or change on the site for 4 years (and its still in beta) so i guess you could call it dead.

[CyberCoder]

This ones not really dead, but it should be Visual Basic
:D :D :D
It's still promoted by MS
Pascal (I didn't really think Pascal was dead, but seeing as people mentioned it, I figured I might as well do too)
.................... by Borland

[cybertron]

I wish someone would write a more modern compiler for QBASIC. I had a lot of fun learning to program in that because it had built-in graphic functions, so it was really easy to write games (although anything requiring speed needed ASM libraries:)). I've always thought that BASIC is inherently the best language to start learning in because of the simple syntax (no ;'s:)) that allows you to get the concept of programming first. Once you grasp the basics of a paradigm, it's pretty easy to learn a new syntax.

The problem with BASIC now is that it is horribly slow and memory limited. That's why I wish someone would rewrite the compiler so it got rid of some of the stupidity, but kept the easy syntax. Maybe even add some OO capability:). Of course I'm biased since it was my first language, so flame away everyone who learned Pascal first:p

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by cybertron
That's why I wish someone would rewrite the compiler so it got rid of some of the stupidity, but kept the easy syntax. Maybe even add some OO capability. You seem to actually want VB. That's exactly what it is.

Keep the dumb thing away from me, though, as long as I have a choice in the matter. C is much, much better (semicolons are the least of your worries -- the biggest problem when coding is not the semicolons, it's having the mental discipline to be able to break down the problem you want to solve, and express each tiny step in a way that $insert_language can understand).

[nugget15]

I know French, but no programming langs realy. I know some python and some c. but I'm still a noobie with this.

[cybertron]

Originally posted by bwkaz
You seem to actually want VB. That's exactly what it is.

Keep the dumb thing away from me, though, as long as I have a choice in the matter. C is much, much better (semicolons are the least of your worries -- the biggest problem when coding is not the semicolons, it's having the mental discipline to be able to break down the problem you want to solve, and express each tiny step in a way that $insert_language can understand).

Never used VB (fortunately). I'm disappointed (but not surprised) that MS screwed up twice with BASIC. I still think that if someone wrote a compiler that would make BASIC code acceptably fast I would use it more. Way back when, I heard something about Powerbasic, which was supposed to be a lot better, but it kind of faded out of existence AFAIK.

Of course, I've kind of fallen in love with C/C++ and all the cool tools available for them, so even a newer language like Java doesn't really cut it for me. Granted, Java has a lot of the same speed problems that BASIC did, since it's pseudo-interpreted instead of compiled, but at least it's OO and various other things.

I guess I'm just closed-minded when it comes to programming languages. BASIC was the first one I learned period, and C++ was the first useful one I learned. Heaven forbid I ever have to learn COBOL:).

[dr_te_z]

Proffesionally I still code COBOL. That language is here to stay!
(http://tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net / http://open-cobol.sourceforge.net/)

I used to work with databus (datapoint) and Business Basic (MAI basic four).

[CptKrf]

Anybody remember Autocoder from IBM 1401 days?