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The oldest programming language you've used
| 38% | 101 votes |
| 15% | 41 votes |
| 0% | 2 votes |
| 1% | 3 votes |
| 11% | 29 votes |
| 1% | 5 votes |
| 21% | 57 votes |
| 8% | 22 votes |
[ Voting Booth | Other Polls | Back Home ]
- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
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The oldest programming language you've used
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(1)
(1)
Fortune's current rates:
Answers .10
Long answers .25
Answers requiring thought .50
Correct answers $1.00
Dumb looks are still free.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 06, @10:02AM (22 children)
Here are the Dates of the languages:
FORTRAN: October 1956
COBOL: January 1960
LISP: April 1960
SNOBOL: mid 1962
APL: December 1962
PL/1: April 1964
C: June 1972
(Score: 3, Informative) by Dr Spin on Tuesday August 06, @08:32PM (7 children)
I answered Cobol assuming it was older than it is, which I used in 1974, but I also programmed in Fortran2 in about 1968, on an IBM 709 (vacuum tube computer, later upgraded to 7090 - same architecture, but transistors) - helping my mother - (before I programmed in Cobol).
Not sure of the date of Fortran2, but I am sure it is old. I also managed to crash Multics reliably and repeatably, with a Fortran IV program I wrote in 1973.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 06, @10:18PM (6 children)
FORTRAN II was November of 1958, so still older than COBOL.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday August 08, @01:38PM (5 children)
Yes. They really should have separated Fortran II from Fortran IV, as those are very different languages. (Was there ever a Fortran III? And what is the original Fortran, to which Fortran II is the successor? I've never seen mention of either of those.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Thursday August 08, @04:09PM (3 children)
I am not able to find the manuals - lost during a house move years ago.
AFAIK Fortran (prior to Fortran2) did not exist outside of IBM and a couple of Customers (one might have been DoD :-)
Fortran III probably never made it to the UK where I live. My mother worked for CEIR, who rented out (as time share) very old second user
IBM kit they imported from the USA.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 09, @12:41AM (2 children)
The original Fortran only targeted the IBM 701 and 704. Fortran II was more portable and they had compilers for many more IBM systems. Fortran III was again limited to the 701 and 704 and any other machine that could run in 704 compatibility mode, but was really only used by internal mainframes and the DoD. The took the best of 2 and 3 and other new ideas and created 4. Fortran IV really took off because it was offered for even more targets including some from competitors. This is because progress was already being made on the upcoming ANSI FORTRAN (which became FORTRAN66) and IBM guaranteed to port any incompatible Fortran 4 code written by IBM customers to upcoming ANSI standard of Fortran (which was eventually released as F66). This made everyone pretty confident in the future of Fortran code so competitors had to support it to get customers that used Fortran.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Dr Spin on Sunday August 11, @01:43PM (1 child)
In those days "portable" and "compatible" were very poorly defined. Companies like CDC, DEC, DG and ICL typically produced several Fortran compilers each that were not all that compatible with each other, let alone IBM's offerings.
SNOBOL was not the oldest language I used, but it was by far the weirdest - it out-weirded FORTH by several crooked miles!
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday August 20, @01:52PM
It depends.
I have programmed in all of these languages, except for APL.
I first put my hands on a programming in September of 1973. It was in BASIC. So, "none of the above".
On the other hand, I would answer "The oldest programming language you've used" would be FORTRAN because it was the oldest of the languages listed.
:^)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday August 27, @10:48AM
That's because they kinda sucked. Most people started on Fortran IV - A New Hope, and still have that and its successors as their favourite version. Fortran II - Attack of the EQUIVALENCE wasn't quite as bad as Fortran I - The Phantom DOI=1.100, but both were still pretty awful.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday August 06, @10:40PM
Gcode, 1952 I believe.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Touché) by The Vocal Minority on Wednesday August 07, @05:42AM (5 children)
And I don't think I'm the only one. Come on, you know who you are, confess!
(Score: 2) by liar on Wednesday August 07, @02:30PM (1 child)
Commodore 64 basic count?
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Thursday August 08, @11:27PM
Sure, it is just 15-20 years later then the invention and it was a derivative of Microsoft BASIC, just like all Commodore BASIC versions from the PET to the C64 to the Amiga version, and not the Dartmouth version. But I can't see why it would not count, it just won't be all that old compared to the other options.
But it was the first thing I programmed on my own to. Just not the oldest language I have ever programmed or used.
(Score: 2) by weeds on Thursday August 08, @01:48AM
Yes, I admit, first programmed in Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Friday August 09, @04:03PM (1 child)
There are only so many choices that can fit in the pole.
I used BASIC in the late 1970s as did practically everyone.
I briefly used FORTRAN on an IBM 1130 with punched cards and 029 keypunch (sometimes using 026 keypunch in admin office) while in college. Later used FORTRAN and other more modern languages on a mini computer with interactive terminals.
I used COMMON LISP for years, for amusement, but I don't know if that counts for ancient 1959 lisp.
Universal health care is so complex that only 32 of 33 developed nations have found a way to make it work.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10, @08:45PM
There is a debate about whether Common Lisp or Scheme are the true standard bearer for LISP. I don’t know enough to have an opinion, but it seems quite contentious at times. Perhaps, someone who knows more can provide some useful insight on the situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07, @07:09AM
to be fair, I think FORTRAN will win because of all the physics done with FORTRAN77, rather than earlier versions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 07, @04:20PM
Oh, I (incorrectly) assumed COBOL was older than Fortran... I suppose, technically, I probably was using Fortran 77 when I was typing it into the fancy new CRT terminals in 1983... they had just retired the punch cards from academic class use in that semester, but you could still submit a punch card job if you really wanted to... I never bothered.
I may have given a cursory glance at some COBOL code once or twice, but never felt the desire to do anything in it.
If you count my Fortran experience as 1977, then 6502 assembly language comes in slightly older at 1975.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday August 07, @07:41PM
LISP: April 1960
And other languages are still catching up.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 08, @02:14PM
No shit, Sherlock.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday August 08, @04:22PM
BASIC: 1964
(Version I probably used) Microsoft BASIC: 1975
(Could have been this one though) IBM BASIC: 1981
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11, @08:37PM
Pascal: 1970
reading all these comments I realized that (for me) after BASIC there was a gap, then a brief period of Pascal before C, C++ and then Fortran.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Tuesday August 06, @10:12AM
I programmed in CORAL 64 which, as you can probably guess, was produced in 1964. It was a language used for real-time systems in both military, scientific and industrial applications.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 06, @10:17AM (2 children)
A lot of old code for fluid dynamics simulators is written in FORTRAN. Many of those simulation tools are still in use. Sometimes it's necessary to modify the code in the fluid dynamics model for the purposes of conducting an experiment, so I've done a bit of FORTRAN programming. I've used a few of the others on the list, but the oldest language I've used extensively is C. However, given the question in this poll, my response is FORTRAN.
(Score: 2) by ShovelOperator1 on Thursday August 15, @10:43PM (1 child)
I was also using FORTRAN. Not only fluid dynamics, but also FE codes for mechanical simulations are in it. Some are so old that design decisions from 1980s are still visible, and to maintain compatibility they cannot be touched. Doesn't matter that we don't have their 4CPU machine in which 3 CPUs were calculating and one was responsible for visualization - the data must still be packed neatly in 3 separate components for further processing (plus one "zero" component - for visualization's processor), and on top of everything there's a nice MPI interface installed to finally run it on more CPUs. The latest release of this expensive simulation software was around March 2023.
I know this as I was writing code responsible for some laws of physics for mechanical simulation software.
The funny thing is that I started with C/C++, even made a C++ and C# bridge for one of these simulation programs, however, these bridges were never popular (although the Perl-based GUI which built a pre-processor's C++-like GUI code from FORTRAN code of physical law was quite useful internally and a few scientists really used it). The good thing in mathematical modelling with FORTRAN is its total accessibility of passed data, i.e. even if you pass an element of an array to the function, you usually still have some kind of access to this array in the function too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16, @08:30AM
with the GPU revolution, I think at least half the fortran codes now have C++ addons (with fortran-c binding to access C interfaces of C++/CUDA/HIP functionality).
"openmp target" may yet save fortran, but I think the pure C++ backends already written won't be thrown out because they're so much easier to adapt to new standards/hardware...
admittedly, this is mostly because C/C++ compilers are much better today than fortran compilers (fortran compilers don't cover all standards properly).
in any case, the recommendation to physicists today is "any new project should use C/C++ and you should consider refactoring/rewriting old fortran codes, if you want to take advantage of available hardware".
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 06, @03:28PM (3 children)
We programmed machines using timers and switches, and simple on/off sensors when I started maintenance. Physical limiters dictated things like shot size and pressure, physical timers counted down duration of the pressure. The newer machines used CPUs and mainboards, with computer menus, but the old green machines relied on manually adjusting everything. And, those old green machines had horrid messes of spaghetti wiring inside the panels, where you could spend hours tracking down a circuit.
We literally threw a party when the last of the old green Van Dorn machines was loaded onto a tractor trailer, to be hauled off to a junk yard. 30,000 pounds of headache, gone from the factory floor!
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday August 07, @02:57PM (2 children)
I have a family member that was at Intel for the longest time and he told me about how when they were wiring up machines each foot of a cable added a nanosecond to the transit time. That often did matter with some of the stuff they were doing or it'd all get out of sync. "How do we connect these two things when the cable can only be so long?"
Perhaps my imagination is doing a little more work here than my memory, but this is why I understood some machines having intestines instead of wires, so to speak.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07, @05:16PM
here's Grace Hopper talking about nanoseconds https://youtu.be/oE2uls6iIEU?t=259 [youtu.be]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07, @10:27PM
That is one reason why modern circuits have designs like this: https://i.sstatic.net/7eJ2r.jpg [sstatic.net] or https://i.redd.it/6vz0y8ybj1861.jpg [i.redd.it] on them. Some of those designs are to keep the tracks equal. Others to make them multiples of the same distance. Others are to purposefully add delays measured in tens of picoseconds. Others are to purposefully add resonant reflections. Others affect the speed of the signal propagation by taking adjusting the number of squares in the sheet resistance. When you get into analog, HF, and RF, things can get complex or weird quickly.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tork on Wednesday August 07, @02:51PM (2 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday August 07, @06:39PM
I had both a Vic 20 and a Commodore 64. Those bring back memories of being young, broke and still somehow finding the money to buy them :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11, @09:56AM
A perfect ending to that story. I totally resonate. Thanks for the laugh.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday August 07, @05:39PM
BASIC was the programming language I first used, before I went to school. When I was in school, Java was all the rage, but C and C++ were definitely taught. I did learn HTML at that time as well, though it's not usually mentioned as a computer language. Despite the L in HTML standing for Language. I steered clear of FORTRAN and COBOL. Partly due to the fact that they were seen as dying languages 20+ years ago.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 07, @06:25PM
I mean, C is probably the oldest language I used (and not C 99, but an old Borland compiler).
But I've also played around with 8088 and MIPS assembler, which were both early 1980's.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday August 07, @06:37PM
Can't remember the exact year, sometime like 1984-5 or thereabouts. The BASIC interpreter in the HP 250 minicomputer.
When the company ditched it I wanted to keep it, but then wife-unit refused. I still have the 10 MB hard-drive subsystem that was used with the 250. A big mother, weighs something like 40 pounds.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Wednesday August 07, @09:49PM
The first actual programming I did was in AppleSoft Basic on an Apple II; must have been 1985 or 1986? (A simple math quiz game that had your spaceship hopping across a starmap, blowing up aliens by correctly answering the math questions).
Oldest on the list would be FORTRAN, took that course in 1987 in my first quarter of college, done on the VAX.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 1) by holeinone on Friday August 09, @11:33PM (1 child)
Thank you for making me feel young on my birthday.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday August 09, @11:41PM
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10, @08:49PM (12 children)
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=61748&page=1&cid=1368067#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
Kind of feels like death threats should be spam modded, but what do I know?
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12, @01:39AM (9 children)
Again, it is the notice that there is racist Nahtzee death threats on SN that gets spam modded, rather than the threat itself. Welcome to Bizarro SN! At least the right-wing nut job has been deleted. That should stir the wasp's nest quite a bit!
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by janrinok on Monday August 12, @03:15AM (8 children)
Can you please identify the comment containing the threat. We cannot take action until we know which comment you are referring to.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12, @07:49PM (5 children)
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=61748&page=1&cid=1368067#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
You were probably the one that removed access to it. Wasn't the most direct threat, "make you race traitors pay", can be argued as vague, but when you are spam modding a clearly off topic comment and literally censoring harmless accurate insults by only some, well you've hot a hypicrisy problem! I think we all remember the infamous call to genocide millions of US citizens. If that is protected by free speech then you should not be blocking any other speech or banning any user if you will tolerate the promotion of genocide.
I prefer the limits, but not the hypocritically uneven application of the rules. If you're complaint is that the site functionality makes it too hard to tell who is who then remove AC posting entirely, or give up your crusade and stop harrassing the wrong people.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12, @07:53PM (3 children)
"I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers."
If that were true you would be spam modding all personal attacks, not just the 100% valid insults like calling certain users fascists when they promote fascism, or liars when they spread lies, etc. Many times you have justified your actions with "sounds like aristarchus" which last I checked means being liberal and calling out rightwing fascists.
If you say personal attacks are against the rules then you must spam mod yourself and many other users that do so, not just when it hurts your feefees.
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Wednesday August 14, @03:06PM
Yes I'm that old.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17, @08:49AM (1 child)
I enjoyed the heck out of the pattern matching in SNOBOL4 back in the day. I used it heavily at work for just those capabilities, combined with some number crunching in UCSD Pascal, with the final results of both worked over with a UI written in BASIC. SNOBOL4 was really slow for everything else than the pattern matching, but that slowness was offset by the good results and since other languages at the time could not do that, it was a good fit. If I recall correctly there were even some hooks for fuzzy pattern matching including some for some specialized hardware for that purpose.
I took a class in FORTRAN IV back when it was current but was unimpressed, so never actually used it in production. I hear, however, that it is still the best for number crunching in very large data sets. It may be only a little bit faster, but when dealing with a large enough data set, that little bit is actually quite large too.
I've dabbled in M or MUMPS but not seriously. I did have a good use case for it back when I was still using SNOBOL4 though. However, some non-technical barriers got in the way of settling in. M has kept up with the times, see also: https://gitlab.com/YottaDB/DB/YDB [gitlab.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18, @02:24AM
The pattern matching in SNOBOL was insane. You could do arbitrary context-sensitive matches in it. Just take your BNF, DCG, or other formal language, translate it to their syntax, and it would do the rest. Nothing comes close to matching that power today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26, @04:04PM
I used lots of insidious silly parentheses to write some EMACS macros once.
I've been thinking of learning COBOL just because the code is starting to outlive the people who wrote it. And I have an appreciation for things that are extremely horrible.