Comments on: Surviving the Programming Language Dead Pool

By: Rick Morris

Rick Morris — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:31:25 +0000

You’re welcome. I think it was 1999, actually.

But did you HAVE to remind me about that nightmare ASP project? I think that’s the closest I ever came to a heart attack.

By: Rick Tuttle

Rick Tuttle — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:16:43 +0000

Thanks for the proofread Mr. Morris. You were an English major, were you not?

BTW, I have you to thank for introducing me to PHP. Remember, we were on this awful ASP (1.0) project circa 1998 and you said something like, “have you ever tried PHP?”

Game over.

One of the many reasons I value your friendship.

By: Rick Morris

Rick Morris — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:13:14 +0000

What programming languages are in your dead pool?

That’s a funny one for me, since I went right from Fortran in college engineering (yes and some annoying Basic), to at least a 10-year-gap where I tried to forget computers ever existed, and then started in to learning PHP and Javascript when the WWW came about. So I don’t have a long dead list. I guess I can include a brief flirtation with ASP and Visual Basic. Except, for some stupid reason, I did a few Access applications years ago, and the original customers keep coming back to me, BOGGLING my mind that they are still using that old app. Which means I even had to use some VBA as recently as last year. Ugh…

Yes, I count SQL among those languages here to stay, although I sometimes wish we could clean up its cruft and redirect it more toward clearly reflecting the relational model.

My current live list:

SQL
PHP (it’s a workhorse, but staring to bore me)
C (just a sprinkling here or there really speeds up some applications)
Javascript (especially with the jQuery API)
Ruby (fun but slow)
Python (not quite as fun as Ruby, but fast!)

Languages I want to start toying with:

Lua (waiting for a good Apache module)
D (an attempt at a next-generation version of C/C++)

BTW Tuttle, I notice you listed MySQL twice. I’m guessing you meant for PostgreSQL to have the top position, right? Right?

By: Nabeel

Nabeel — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:27:08 +0000

Great article.
Some things to keep in mind.

By: Rick Tuttle

Rick Tuttle — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 03:51:25 +0000

Joe, thanks for being one of the pioneers who made SQL so powerful.

I’m not sure if I got the quote right above but I did get the point. It’s all about the data.

P.S. I linked up your name to your site in the post. Should have done that before.

By: Joe Celko

Joe Celko — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:24:25 +0000

Thanks for the mention. And I agree that SQL is here to stay, just like COBOL. But for different reasons. COBOL has bulk and easy learning The numbers vary but everyone needs to read an issue of DR. DOBB’S last year about COBOL legacy code and why you need to maintian it

SQL is here to stay because
1) it has a Standard that makes it portable; yes, there are dialects, but core Standard SQL ports
2 ) It is a declarative functional programing language that an works with parallel multi-processor chips and systems.
3) It has a commercial code base. Not as big as COBOL, but it is there.