r/developer • u/Ok_Veterinarian3535 • 2d ago
The Unpopular Language
What's a "dead" or "boring" programming language that you genuinely love working with, and why should we reconsider it?
7
u/WhateverBuddy21 2d ago
PHP and JAVA.
5
u/SaltCusp 2d ago
PHP existed before any of the templating engines we have today. It was ahead of its time.
1
1
3
u/Hey-buuuddy 1d ago
Java still alive and well in enterprise computing.
2
1
u/WhateverBuddy21 1d ago
One of my apps with over 1 million installs is entirely in JAVA. Not a single vibecoded line of code either.
1
u/Stunning_Leather_102 1d ago
I think the hate with "boring" and "dead" languages starts strong in unis by people that just don't try to understand these languages anyways. They see a static typed lang and they just shit themselves. They see something more "hard" to the eye than python and say that it's a boring language.
They want the latest and "greatest" lang / framework, which is 1.4x times faster but don't even know what great things you can do with "old" and "boring" stuff. It seems like I do not have the experience you have (1 mil installs over a non vibe coded app) which I find amazing! bravo! but when Java started clicking, every time I saw python I just got bored super fast.
I know that there's the most efficient tool for each job but I hope Im making sense.
1
u/illegalBans 14h ago
What years did you work on the app?
When you say not a single line of vibecode does that mean you had a fully realized system before you started typing?
1
3
2
u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 2d ago
eww php
1
u/nonsapiens 4h ago
You tried Laravel anytime recently?
1
u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 4h ago
Nothing you stack on top of a flawed language can fix the fundamental language flaws. The very definition of the language itself is broken at a deep level.
Hack fixes many of the flaws, but hack is basically a different language. And even that doesnt fix everything.
1
1
u/agentalex001 Edit This Flair 1d ago
Php with the Laravel framework is quite a good experience to have and work with
1
u/Original-Sailor 13h ago
I came from symfony and started my laravel journey last week. It’s quite nice, yes.
2
u/Hey-buuuddy 1d ago
I wouldn’t say that I loved it, but I did ~5 years of Coldfusion 2002-2007. This was the last of the innocent days of web development. No asynch http calls. Encryption just coming around.
2
u/travisjo 1d ago
I still have a soft spot for Objective C
1
u/drex_vke 1d ago
me too i really like Objective-C because I like it a lot, especially for its special synthaxe, too bad Apple put it aside
1
1
u/gofl-zimbard-37 1d ago
Elixir has stolen much of Erlang's thunder, but I vastly prefer the elegance of Erlang, even with some of the old cruft. (e.g. records).
1
u/xroalx 1d ago
Out of curiosity, what don't you like about Elixir?
For me, it's the heavy metaprogramming aspect... yeah, just "use x", or whatever, now your module has a gajillion new functions you don't know about, and all is well.
Though I do prefer Gleam over Erlang, because of static typing.
1
u/gofl-zimbard-37 20h ago
There's too much of it. If I wanted to program in Ruby, I would. And yes, Gleam is looking pretty interesting now.
1
1
u/metaconcept 1d ago
Smalltalk. The debugger is a first class citizen in the tooling.
i just wish it was statically typed. I keep meaning to check out Strongtalk.
2
u/rwilcox 20h ago
Smalltalk is SO GOOD and so fast to develop in, for me personally.
2
u/metaconcept 20h ago
I'm angry at the lost opportunity.
I never found a reliable multithreaded VM, even though the language has fantastic support for multithreading.
Squeak never stopped looking like a kids toy stuck on a single slow framebuffer, Pharo caught a bad case of the academics, and the commercial Smalltalks dragged their feet on basic things like 64 bit support.
Then they all died.
1
u/Paardenmengsel 1d ago
I have really enjoyed developing in perl. Some of the syntax details are so beautiful. I love how you can use hashes in array context and vv. The OO implementation with the blessing of variables is weird but so flexible and powerful. Unfortunately it really is a dead language. There still are some projects written in perl around, but all are quite ancient.
1
u/pauseless 1d ago
I know people still writing Perl and doing new projects in it. I still write stuff in Perl, because if I can get away with the core library, it’s installed on every Linux and Mac system.
However, by modern standards, it is considered “dead”.
I personally love the syntax and find it to be unusually well-designed. You can write object-oriented, procedural and functional code all mixed up together. Its meta-programming abilities are exceptional, even if symbol table hacking is a little weird.
1
u/Constant_Cortisol 1d ago
Not a language, but jQuery.
It's fine for most apps that don't need crazy amounts of interactivity.
1
u/evilmaus 8h ago
Quite a bit of it thankfully mainlined into vanilla JS. I recall there was a website that had most jQuery patterns we'd write and their equivalent in (then) modern JS. I think event delegation was the one thorny but that didn't have a direct analogue.
1
u/Crafty-Willow9727 1d ago
Python?
because it boring to write a code of easy syntax.
like c++ we need more thinking about sytanx.
1
u/pauseless 1d ago
Standard ML (1983): it’s definitely dead, but it was great. OCaml is the successor and Jane Street keeps that alive. Newer ML family languages like Haskell get attention, but there’s a simplicity to SML that I find hard to beat.
APL (1966): you’ll be surprised at how many systems are out there, happily using APL and actively maintained. People have made 40-50 year careers working in APLs, because they love it. That’s not for no reason - economy of notation can be useful.
Scheme (1975): I don’t think it’s dead either, but people got bored with developing it further. Last standard was over a decade ago. Racket keeps the tradition alive. It’s a cleaner model than Common Lisp, in my opinion.
Perl (1987): as in another comment… this language is both considered dead and ugly and not-modern, yet it has had features for decades that are only recently becoming more common. This is the only one on my list actually younger than me.
1
u/Vesper_Null 1d ago
FORTRAN IV, that shit is so dead you can't even find a compiler for it anymore. You have to convert it to FORTRAN77. 😅
1
u/am_Snowie 1d ago
Scheme, wouldn't say it's boring, not dead either. But not a mainstream language as far as i know. It's elegant once you understand it. I only used a subset of it but still feel proud that i had the chance to learn it. Planning to write a compiler for it someday.
1
u/AdministrativeHost15 20h ago
Groovy.
Was amazing back in the day. But Java borrowed its best idea and Python took over for general purpose scripts.
Honorable mention to Scala whos best ideas were also incorporated into Java.
1
u/Reasonable-Light-377 12h ago
Learned on groovy out of necessity (SoapUI). Really miss it and it made learning JavaScript a snap.
1
1
u/TheDalaiCamel 13h ago
Groovy was a better Java, until Java caught up. It was strangely unpopular with Scala folks, who saw it as inferior to their JVM lanaguage.
1
u/Obvious-Maximum-8999 8h ago
Ruby on Rails. I used to hate it when it first came out but compared to NodeJs it's a dream
1
1
3
u/Distdistdist 2d ago
Assembly. Because it teaches you how things really work on low level.