I’m not really a software person, but I have done some work in G (the Labview language), and I quite enjoyed it. But then I am a very visual person.
Software engineer with 30 years of industry experience here. I’ve written in BASIC (many dialects), Pascal, Algol W (anyone remember that?), PDP/11 assembler, HP’s SPL (unless you worked at HP, you’ve never heard of it), FORTRAN, APL, C, C++, JavaScript, Java, and I’m sure others that don’t come readily to mind. I’ve been working pretty much exclusively in Java since 1.0, and if I have my 'druthers I’ll go to retirement without ever having to write in anything else. C and C++ are for control-freaks; Java is for those who want to get the job done.
Java is my luxury language. I’d write everything in Java if I could. On the other end of the scale, plain old C is another favorite, just for simplicity and better access to low-level stuff.
Never tried C#, but I’ll get around to it one of these days…
I program for a video game company, so I spend my days in C++. I don’t hate it; the standard library is wretched, but it beats writing raw C all day. I use Ruby for my own fun projects, but it’s not really a language for writing game engines in.
Cobol :d
I should have applied at your place when I was in Dayton looking for work. I still like COBOL too. (My company still has two clients on our HP3000/COBOL legacy.)
I’m in Oracle Forms & Reports and PL/SQL now. I’ll be studying Java and C++ or C# to expand my repertoire before I move north. I figure COBOL will still be my favorite.
Java. Debugging is a breeze(I’ve had to use jdb approximately twice in my lifetime) and garbage collection saves so many headaches. I find it to be a much cleaner language than C or C++.
Next would be C. After that, assembler, and than C++. This isn’t to say that I’d rather program in assembler than C++, but that I’d rather work on a project in which assembler is necessary/feasible than work on a C++ project.
After that would come any OO language, then any procedural language, then any functional language, and at the bottom of the list is the scripting languages. If it’s not compiled, I don’t want to deal with it.
VB6 all the way, baby.
I’ve messed around with VB.net and it’s another case of Microsoft fixing something that wasn’t broken and screwing it up royally when they did.
I don’t mind Pascal if it’s in a visual IDE such as Delphi (I’ve recently been looking at Lazarus - a front end for the FPC, but it’s not mature enough yet…).
I actually like VB. Please don’t hate me, but I also liked VBA (at least the MS Access version of it) a lot - being able to embed SQL directly into the code was a massive boon for what I had to do. There are lots of reasons not to like it (interpreted code instead of proper compilation, for example), but VBA does actually have a number of great strengths.
I no longer have “favorite” languages (they all kind of blur together now), but am I the only person who thinks that the .NET version of VB is a vast improvement on the incoherent babble that was VB 6.0 and earlier? Heck, I’d have switched just for the decent exception handling alone.
Except for the moronic idea that an array of dimension 10 should have ELEVEN elements in it (thus making them hideously error prone), I can’t think of a single feature that VB 6 did better than VB.NET. And as nostalgic as you might be for them, 1-based arrays are gone from pretty much every other language out there.
I should probably add that I have been quite impressed by Ruby - although I have never actually tried to use it, the concept seems very sound.
A fellow sufferer! I dread it when I get anything other than a very basic report to write, Reports must be my least favorite tool ever*, using the layout model is like pushing string, one slip of the mouse and the whole thing falls to pieces (the first rule of Oracle Reports: Save often.)
I get to write a fair amount of Pro*C (C with embedded SQL) and the occasional shell script. So I don’t have to spend all my time CODING IN UPPERCASE.
I have tinkered with C# and liked it a lot, never got started with C++. Got to do some work with Java and loathed it, though that may have been due to the project setup – ten minute compile times (using Ant IIRC) – WTF? and the IDE – NetBeans urgh.
Looks like we’re going to Java for new development rather than C#. Bollocks.
*And this is the latest GUI version, the old character based version was a method of torture.
I currently work in C++, Java, C#, and all kinds of web languages. In the past, I’ve worked with everything from assembler on up.
C# is where it’s at. I much prefer it to Java. And after writing C/C++ code for a couple of decades, if I never had to look at another line of it that’ll suit me just fine. C# has memory management, the .Net object model is very nice, the syntax is clean, it’s got absolutely fantastic debugging support, and Visual Studio is a nice development environment.
The new .NET 3.0 is also great. WPF kicks ass.
I work with Borland’s Delphi. It has a reasonable IDE, and is fairly robust. It’s also what the corporate powers decided upon for our client-side development.
I’m writing my dissertation in Standard ML. I prefer functional languages over any other. I’m going to try and learn Haskell once I’ve finished my dissertation - it’s design is nicer and it has more libraries.
Ooh…
What version are you currently using?
Have you upgraded in the past? If so, from what version originally? Di d you have any problems migrating existing code.
Here’s why I’m asking: I have just taken over support and development of a large and complicated system that has been created in Delphi 3. This is a really old version and it’s becoming increasingly hard to find components to add new functions as the need arises. I want to know whether there is a viable upgrade path for existing code, or whether it’s going to be a painful process by hand.
Control arrays?
I do most of my coding in Assembler. No, really.
When opportunities permit (alas, too seldom) I get to use C or C++. I’ve been experimenting with Objective-C lately but haven’t really gotten into it yet.
I do very large cross-platform (XP/OS-X) retail projects, so C++/STL is my world. Its actually quite nice, and our local implementation of COM-ish things make memory management quite nothing to handle. Objects commit suicide as needed, thank you. Scope is your friend.
Our dev environment diddles with Python and Perl and Java, but they’re not part of the Product, just the dev env and installer. I’ve diddled in all three of these, and never found time to get comfortable – solve the problem and move on. But Java seemed pretty cool.
In previous lives, I’ve done 6502, 68000, x86 flavors of assembly ( I kinda miss these; these days its SIMD macro stuff, which is cool, but removed one step). I liked assembly for the class of problems you could solve (typically graphic alg performance for me, I was never a driver nerd).
Very early, I did crippled BASIC (Apple, MS)+assembly and Pascal (Apple, Borland).
I don’t miss the old days, but I’m getting tired of C/STL, and ready to do something real in a Next-NexGen language.
Oh, yeah:
I once wrote an embedded product (portable handheld barcode reader) in some COBOL dialect. The product came out fine, but… never again.