What’s the oldest, weirdest, nastiest, or most unusual language you’ve ever coded in?

Mat8iou said:

I've never come across Fortran other than mentions and brief descriptions in books, but am told it is still used in physics labs etc.

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All the computation engine of the product I work on is written in Fortran (electrical engineering related). It started out as a product in the mid 1970s so a lot of the code has been replaced with F90 code but if I were to dig around, I bet I could find some old stuff written in F77 prior to 1990 still hanging on somewhere. We have other languages doing things 'around' the engine (Python and C++/C, primarily). Fortran rules still allow for some extremely aggressive optimizations that aren't as clear in other languages.

Mat8iou said:

Coul

Could be Autodesk's own marketing. They deprecated their IDE (in favour of VS Code), which makes sense as why develop an IDE when others out there are flexible enough to do what you need.
Some of their announcements made it sound like they were scrapping the whole thing.
That said, I don't know how many people use the IDE - it was around for years before the IDE existed and people managed fairly well. It isn't generally used for big complicated programs, so doesn't seem so necessary for it to have an IDE as some things.

Visual LISP IDE will be removed from ACAD

So if your not already aware, AutoDesk released an AutoLISP extension for Microsoft VS Code. In ACAD 2021 help directory under "What's New or Changed with AutoLISP" they drop this little tidbit Quote Obsolete Visual LISP IDE (Windows Only) - The Visual LISP (VL) IDE has been retired and will be r...

www.cadtutor.net

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Visual LISP GUI is still in Windows 2000 era. I hope that since AutoCAD 2024 is switching to modern .NET, it will be possible to use their API through .NET Interactive (i.e. Notebooks for .NET) and VS Code. I maintain and develop several AutoCAD plugin with .NET, that would be helpful.

dspariI said:

Substantial is overstating it. NumPy doesn't use it at all, the non-Python bits are mostly C, but it does provide a Fortran to Python bridge. SciPy does use it and a handful modules are essentially just Fortran code with a Python wrapper e.g. interpolation, but some of those chunks have "last modified" dates in the comments dating to the 80s. They seem more like old code that works over anything else. I work in the sciences and do encounter Fortran code every once in a while, but in my experience, Python mostly took over as the day-to-day language.

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You won't find the relevant source in NumPy itself. I was thinking of linkage to BLAS and LAPACK libraries for core linear algebra operations.

MilleniX said:

You won't find the relevant source in NumPy itself. I was thinking of linkage to BLAS and LAPACK libraries for core linear algebra operations.

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Yes, I was looking at the source directly. Maybe it'd be more encompassing to say that BLAS and LAPACK are core to most scientific libraries in general. It's even part of the dependency chain for QT 5 for reasons I don't understand on Rocky Linux / RHEL 9 but not 8.

dspariI said:

It's even part of the dependency chain for QT 5 for reasons I don't understand

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That's weird and surprising even to me.

C pre-processor. I worked on a MS Office compatible suite for iOS and Android before native C++ on Android. The low level part of the code that parsed the xml (we didn't really bother with legacy binary formats) to populate data structures was entirely C pre-processor. It would spit out Obj-C for iOS and Java for Android. It was a subset of both languages, as it only knew what people had written macros for. We used Macs running Windows in a VM to use MSVC to run the pre-processor stage (MSVC had decent autocomplete for pre-processor macros) and then finish up in Xcode for iOS. Completely insane.