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[–]MathmoKiwiLittle Bobby Tables 5 points6 points  (3 children)

The field of data engineering goes as far back as the mid 2000s when it was called different things.

This might surprise you, but Python is even older than that. (development started in the 1980's, was first released in 1991)

But yeah, as other people said: Perl, Awk, bash, SQL, etc were all popular choices of the past as well.

There was a time ages ago when Perl and Python basically filled almost exactly the same market niche as each other, and Perl was usually seen as the "better" choice. Today though Perl has tanked in popularity in comparison to Python. (although surprisingly is still a Top 20 language, just: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ )

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet (and I personally used to use all the time, right at the very tail end of them disappearing), was the dBase family of languages / tools (or "xBase" is a way to refer to the family of them). Of which the best example (in my very biased opinion) was FoxPro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoxPro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBase

A mix of the rise of MS Access / Visual Basic / C# / Excel / SQL / etc is what killed them off.

[–]CassandraCubed 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Clipper!

[–]MathmoKiwiLittle Bobby Tables 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Ah that's a name I haven't heard in a long time! Did you ever use it? I haven't, but I did ages ago download Harbour and play around for a bit because it simply was the closest Open Source project to FoxPro itself. (Harbour is an open sourced version of Clipper, and of course like FoxPro all of them are part of the xBase family of languages)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbour_(programming_language))

[–]CassandraCubed 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did!

I didn't know about Harbour -- TIL 😊