What programming languages have you used?

[bascule]

The more languages you've used, particularly from different areas, the better programmer you'll be! The Pragmatic Programmers recommend learning a new language every year. I'm presently learning a language called Scala.

 

What languages have you used?

[D H]

This goes back 38 years and is not complete. In time order, more or less.

Basic, PL/I, JCL and DOS (360, 370, CP/CMS), Assembler (many flavors, all forgotten), FORTRAN (IV, 66, 77), APL, HP RTE OS (Worst OS Ever), Ultrix, VAX/VMS, Lisp (InterLisp and ZetaLisp; I had Symbolics Machine #2!), an AI language I can't remember, Pascal, CLIPS, ART, Prolog, C, shell (sh, csh, bash, ksh, tcsh), awk, sed, perl, Java, Trick, C++, and Python. Plus a whole lot of tools and software packages.

Edited June 28, 2008 by D H
Forgot some.

[Miri]

Well now In order of fluency:

Java, PHP, Javascript, C++, Ruby, C, Perl, Python

[Mr Skeptic]

I'm familiar with C, C++, Java, and Lisp, and some shell scripting. I've dabbled a bit with BASIC, Perl, Python, Rexx.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Chronologically: TI-BASIC, PHP, Java, a tad of C, Python. I can also work my way around JavaScript (although I never formally "learned it" -- it's just so similar to other languages).

[ajb]

The only thing on the list I have used are forms of BASIC. The one thing I do use quite often is Mathematica, though I am not sure if one would call that a language.

[YT2095]

non of those you`ve listed in your poll.

 

BASIC (6 dielects), Assembly language (Z80, 6502, 680x0), direct machine code (Z80, 6502, 680x0), (Psion)OPL, Forth.

[Gilded]

I've used Java but I've forgotten basically all about it.

[Klaynos]

You forgot R, and R rawks!!!

[CDarwin]

C++ valiantly killed my high school GPA. But I did "use" it there for a while.

 

cout<<"I hate you C++"

[bascule]

To all of those asking for languages that were omitted, unfortunately there's a max of 15 slots on a poll... (also I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Fortran yet)

[D H]

Read the first response.

[chitrangda]

c++ has runied my summer break..and still my program ant working.

[PhDP]

C++'s slogan: Hard to learn and built to stay that way.

 

...from an introductory book to Python, which has become in less than a week my favorite language. I also know "math" languages; Octave/MatLab, Maple, a little bit of Mathematica and SAGE (which is, basically, Python for maths).

[bascule]

Read the first response.

 

Mea culpa

 

C++'s slogan: Hard to learn and built to stay that way.

 

You know, it's funny, I was just realizing how much better C++ would be if it had a garbage collector (even if it were just there so exceptions are sane) and got rid of the C legacy, then realized I was describing Java, which isn't exactly my language du jour (although it appears to be the most popular language around these parts)

[D H]

C++ has so many quirks. Just to name three: Multiple inheritance, polymorphism, and the C++ I/O model.

• The C++ multiple inheritance model is so fraught with pitfalls that many C++ projects have a very simple rule to avoid them: No multiple inheritance.
  
• Why in the world do I have to make a destructor virtual in order to make a class polymorphic? This is not a big problem if you get in the habit of always making destructors virtual, but why? In most other languages, classes are polymorphic, period.
  
• I don't know anyone, not even the most diehard C++ fanatic, who thinks overloading the bit shift operators to form the C++ iostream operators is a good idea. Instead, it is often used as the prototypical example of when not to do operator overloading.

[timo]

Why in the world do I have to make a destructor virtual in order to make a class polymorphic? This is not a big problem if you get in the habit of always making destructors virtual, but why? In most other languages, classes are polymorphic, period.

Non-polymorphic is faster and takes up less memory?

I don't know anyone, not even the most diehard C++ fanatic, who thinks overloading the bit shift operators to form the C++ iostream operators is a good idea. Instead, it is often used as the prototypical example of when not to do operator overloading.

I don't think it is a good idea in the sense that I think it's the best way (though I prefer it over using "+" and over not being able to paste different objects into an output in one command at all). But I don't really see a problem with it, either.

[D H]

Non-polymorphic is faster and takes up less memory?

Water under the bridge, but Stroustrup could have used 'struct' to indicate a non-polymorphic object. As it stands, class and struct are near-synonyms. They differ only in that class has an implicit private after the open brace and struct an implicit public.

[bascule]

I don't know anyone, not even the most diehard C++ fanatic, who thinks overloading the bit shift operators to form the C++ iostream operators is a good idea. Instead, it is often used as the prototypical example of when not to do operator overloading.

 

Languages where you don't do a lot of bit twiddling have found novel new uses for the operators.

 

Ruby uses it for cases where you're adding one object to another but modifying the receiver, e.g.:

 

String concatenation:

>> foo = "foo"; foo << "bar"; foo

=> "foobar"

 

Adding an element to an array:

>> foo = [1,2,3]; foo << 4; foo

=> [1,2,3,4]

 

That said, the way it's used by iostreams is far less straightforward and substantially uglier. Although if you want, Ruby will allow you to print things in a quasi-iostreams style with:

 

STDOUT << "Hello," << "world\n"

 

I can't say I know anyone who'd ever consider writing Ruby like that though.

[D H]

Everyone writes a "Hello, World" program as a test of a language. I once took a CS class where we had to write a program to compare languages. It was not "Hello, World". We had to implement a rather nasty math algorithm in four languages that we got to choose, with constraints. One language had to be a functional language. Two choices were fixed -- Fortran (Fortran before recursion) and assembly. The nasty math function: Ackermann's function. Ouch.

[DrP]

BASIC (6 dielects), Assembly language (Z80, 6502, 680x0), direct machine code (Z80, 6502, 680x0), (Psion)OPL, Forth.

 

 

Machine Code!! Wow! My mate has programed directly machine code. He is a developer and game writes for consols. He used to write a column for one of the games mags in the 80's... 'Crash' I think.

 

 

 

I've only ever the done the most basic things in BASIC. (Q-BASIC, VISUAL and perhaps another form). And even then I've had to get help..

[padren]

Don't forget lolcode - its not just English that's getting butchered.

[JimmyDee]

Production: Assembler (Varian, IBM 360 and macro, Intel), COBOL, Mark IV, RPG II, C, C++, perl

Putzing: several BASICs, APL, java, Python

 

Others, I'm sure...

[bascule]

Some mod should really change O'Caml to "Assembly Language" as I really doubt anyone's going to vote for it.

[Klaynos]

lolcode RAWKS!!!

 

Other than the ones I ticked

 

I've also done some machine code... it was part of one of our practical electronics modules lol! Build some ram program some assembly...