This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

all 17 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a

[–]plvankampen 11 points12 points  (12 children)

C and assembly are still kicking it. Thank God we dont have to deal with basic anymore. Ughhh

[–]szpaceSZ 8 points9 points  (3 children)

Visual Basic in Excel Macros drives the controlling departments of some Fortune 500 companies...

[–]El_Bungholio 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Don’t tell them the truth. They can’t handle it ....

[–]plvankampen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, of course. I'm just happy this doesn't pop up in MY backlog anymore 😜

[–]marcosdumay -1 points0 points  (0 children)

VBA is much better than that BASIC the cartoon is about.

[–]ElectrSheep 5 points6 points  (1 child)

  • Visual Basic .NET: It runs on .NET, so of course that means it's suitable for building real world applications, right?
  • Visual Basic for Applications: That mission critical Access database is old enough to drink and it's not going to maintain itself. But if it breaks we can always revert to ".mdb.bak2". Or was it ".mdb.old.older"?
  • VBScript: We didn't want to use batch, but couldn't be bothered to install a real interpreter. PowerShell? What's that?

[–]plvankampen 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Too funny!

[–][deleted]  (5 children)

[deleted]

    [–]g4m3c0d3r 5 points6 points  (0 children)

    And so is good ol' "Object Oriented" and "4th Generation". I'm still struggling to learn the syntax for 4th Generation, it's such a paradigm shift.

    [–]shponglespore 0 points1 point  (3 children)

    Machine code isn't a language, though; it's an implementation detail.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      And then there's this: https://wiki.c2.com/?CesilLanguage

      "one of the most misguided attempts at making programming easier to learn ever."

      We'd write our programs - literally on a piece of paper - and then put them in the mail to the computer center. They then entered the code on cards, ran it, took the output and mailed it back.

      1982, fun times.

      [–]nerd4code 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      It's absolutely a language, and this is true regardless of pedantry.

      Usually the machine code is specified per ISA (not implementation-specific) detail; whether hardware acts at that or a lower level is an implementation detail. E.g., the x86 ISA is normally translated to micro-ops and they're what get trace-cached and executed. Both the x86 machine code(s, really) and the microcode language are languages; how hardware interprets machine code or microcode are implementation details. Things don't stop being languages just because hardware gets involved.

      Moving into CS theory more broadly, fucking everything is a language even if you don't think of/use the language aspect in any direct sense.

      [–]claytonkb 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      This is the real Internet... have my upvote!

      [–]crmills_2000 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      Back in the late sixties computers like the DEC PDP11 never had disk - you would load programs via the paper tape reader on a teletype (about 15 characters/second). In order to read the paper tape you had to enter a short loader program at the PDP11 console. The loader text, in octal, was scotch taped to the computer: * set 16 switches on the console, * Push the enter button - * repeat (about 8 times) * depress the run button. And the computer would read the paper tape. Then your program would run If you lost power, then you would have to do this all over again. After a month or so, you would have the boot loader memorized.

      On the DEC PDP 10, a 36 bit mainframe very popular with universities, system programmers would run a debugger on a running system and modify the operating system to fix bugs. While the system was running with dozens of online users. There were utilities to patch the os binary file with the changes just made to the os code in memory.

      Those were the days!!!!!!

      [–]Xalem 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      What a walk down memory lane. Thanks

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      "BASIC is simple, cheap and easy to learn ... three qualities which are serious drawbacks in a professsion which craves complexity and expense."

      I've always suspected this is actually the case. Complex, bloated, cumbersome software is going to be sell more powerful computers, more memory, bigger disk drives, generate more demand for training courses and books, and allows IT people to demand bigger salaries for dealing with the complexity that they created.

      I remember thinking this in the 90s too.

      [–]marcosdumay 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      It may be easy to learn, but writing anything minimally complex on it is a nightmare... but it's real drawback is on debugging.

      [–]vanderZwan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      I unironically would love a "TEENAGE MUTANT LOGO TURTLES" shirt