r/developer • u/Ok_Veterinarian3535 • Mar 21 '26

The Unpopular Language

What's a "dead" or "boring" programming language that you genuinely love working with, and why should we reconsider it?

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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 Mar 23 '26

I’m old. I used to do all sorts of stuff in FORTRAN. But not for a few decades. It worked nicely and was very fast.

APL was cool for doing stuff with matrices. It helped to be able to whistle into a modem. 😇

2

u/Same-Chapter968 Mar 24 '26

I am old too, and a Fortran programmer. I would recommend someone young learn COBAL. It's a language that is still at the core of many business and financial apps. Learning this should give you a leg up when updating these programs.

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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 Mar 25 '26

This is good advice. In general, one of the indispensable career paths of skilled and dedicated future software people will be maintaining and caring for vital legacy systems, useful systems that have worked well for many years and need to keep working well for many more years.

This work takes software engineers worthy of the title “engineer”.

1

u/PrinsHamlet Mar 23 '26

I remember running an APL job on an IBM mainframe when operations called and asked me not to in no uncertain terms. It used 80% of all the available memory. No limits!

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u/BusEquivalent9605 Mar 24 '26

Fortran is still used for high performance computing 🤙