Other. Lots of other. Including an "other" I wrote.
Definitely Delphi/Pascal, first and formost!
TableMaster was written in Delphi, which is Pascal under the hood. Given what I had to spend on Delphi Pro (that was what the Kickstarter was for) I probably wouldn't have gone that way if it hadn't been that the
first Windows version of TableMaster was (at least partly) written in Delphi, and the original all the way back was Pascal. (and I fondly remember the days when a compiler didn't cost more than my car ... okay, I drive an old beater, but still!) It was tough enough rebuilding the whole package over 20 years after I wrote the original; I wasn't going to try to learn a new programming language in the process.
I'd already done that, actually: The reason I completely rewrote TableMaster II from scratch instead of re-using my old code is that a lot of the original looks like it was written by someone trying to teach themself Turbo Pascal. There is, of course, a good reason for this.
That misbegotten code stayed there when I moved on to Borland Pascal, which is what the guts of TableMaster I were to the end. In the original, only the Windows UI was Delphi -- yeah, even TM/Win was still a DOS program in disguise; that's why it wouldn't run on anything later than Win98. I've learned a lot about Delphi in the decades since I did that, so I just black-boxed it ... I took a screenshot of the original TM/Win UI (the UI, though not the actual table engine, will still load on WinXP) ... and did the new version to match, except with less stupid.
Then I threw out most of the UI anyway for the FireMonkey refactoring, because there are things I did in the original that actually traced back to Delphi components for Windows 3.1, and nobody does it that way anymore. No Win3.1 file picker.
Given that I was using that for the table list display and selection, that took some rewriting.
Interestingly enough, in the intervening years I did some dorking around with different languages -- I actually got a fair way with a C++ version before I lost interest, and lost the code years ago, and somewhere around I have the start of a Perl version that could load simple tables, though I dropped that before I actually got to executing them -- I was considering an online TableMaster engine of some sort. But it all keeps coming back to Delphi, and to Pascal. It just works very well for what I need to do, particularly for string handling. The fact that Delphi now has flexible arrays is just wonderful; tables used to live in memory dynamically allocated off the heap, all hanging off a couple of pointers. *shudder*
The various random-generation things I've written for my websites have all been in PHP. I don't actually
know PHP, mind you; I just write in it. You go figure. Then again, I don't really know Perl, either, and I do all kinds of back-end site coding in that, too. One of these days I should really actually learn the programming languages I'm using, if only so I can be properly embarrassed about some of the code I've written.
More germane to the Traveller-specific discussion: Back in the 1980s, I wrote a subsector generator after hours at work in Fortran 77. It would even draw the subsector maps -- we had an electrostatic plotter that could produce graphics. High tech for its time! (Versatec 1100) I ran a Traveller campaign for years in a sector I randomly generated that way. Sadly, I lost those maps about six moves ago.
I could recreate the program in my sleep, but the subsector data is long gone, and I wish I had that at least for nostalgia value.
And I did some Traveller utility stuff in BASIC because that's what whichever computer I had back when I was running Traveller had -- I think that was my TS-2068, in fact, with cassette storage, so all of that was lost
long ago. I wanted to do a Library Data program just for the coolness of having a live computer lookup at the games, but never got anywhere with that; the combination of the storage space requirement and the need to type in hundreds of entries stopped me.
So: Delphi, Pascal, F77, BASIC, PHP, and Perl. Most of those aren't on the list.
There's another language that isn't on the list: TBL. (note: this part is a shameless plug, so y'all might want to skip over it) TBL is the language I wrote as part of TableMaster, and it's great for converting any kind of tables (which are, after all, just programs that execute on a system of humans and dice!) into something a computer can make sense of. I never intended to write a programming language, mind you; self-taught programmers who are trying to teach themselves Pascal don't do things like that! It just sort of happened. When I was on the edge of my chair waiting for the Kickstarter to close, I even wrote a bubblesort program in TBL to prove it could be done. (also, I'm clearly a bit obsessed with my own creation) TBL doesn't do graphics, or databases ... that's not what it's intended for ... but when it comes to an easy way to set up random generation tables for
anything, I don't think there's anything out there that's both easier to use and more powerful than TBL. (and if there is, I'll change it until there isn't!)
So, if this nascent software group is interested in doing things that involve random generation of stuff, from simple names to entire character careers, complete star systems, etc., y'all might want to look at TableMaster. TBL can do basically
anything that isn't graphics or databases, and you'll have the advantage, such as it is, of having the designer hanging out here and answering questions -- or, for that matter, adding whole new features to TBL if needed; that's how it first got non-integer variables (real and string), many years ago: user requests. You can grab the demo version off my website. The full program isn't free (I need to buy groceries somehow) but if you buy it, mention that you're from Citizens of the Imperium and I'll throw in the SF Table Pack for free; the tables in that feel very Traveller-y for obvious reasons. (actually, I don't think I've run more than one session of any SF RPG
except Traveller)
So, I guess it's really Delphi, Pascal, F77, BASIC, PHP, Perl, and TBL!
