What Programming Languages do you use?

[Wintertree]

Each version is a new language flavor... which is why I quit looking at it.

Swift makes me swear. I know I have to learn it at some point, but yeah, would they make up their minds already?

 

[JimMarn]

QB64.

It's a modern implementation of QuickBasic/Qbasic.

I do want to get into python, though.

I'm going to try again to find time to work on learning it. No idea when. My relatives tell me I sit and don't walk enough as it is.

 

[ffilz]

Hmm, you forgot sed...

Not sure how much what I actually code in would matter though...

I've got some C code for Traveller, my exposure to Perl as the scripting language for my preferred text/code editor has allowed me to make changes to sec2pdf, and since I've hacked at a Python test harness, I could contribute to the Python Classic Traveller chargen I've seen...

Frank

 

[Adam Dray]

Here's a rough list of languages I've programmed in:

• C (several varieties, but mostly GNU compilers; a little C++)
• ColdFusion
• Java (I'm SCJP 1.5/SCJD 6)
• Web-related languages (e.g., HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery)
  
• Java-related languages/technologies (e.g., JSP, Spring, Hibernate)
  
• SQL (MS SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, mysql, PostgreSQL dialects)
• UNIX shell scripting languages (bash, csh/tcsh, ksh, sh dialects)
• Game programming languages (at least 3 dialects of MUSH softcode; MUCK FORTH/MUF)
• BASIC (at least 6 different dialects, including VBA)
• FORTRAN
• FORTH
• Pascal
• COBOL
• Ada
• Lisp
• PHP
• Perl
• Motorola 68000 assembly (RISC)
• VAX 11/780 assembly (CISC)
• Other esoteric languages that have nothing to do with each other (e.g., SQR, Qlik)

The bolded ones are languages I'm strong in.

I've been pretty strictly "management" for 4-5 years, so my Java and web skills are declining. My MUSH, SQL, and bash skills are still top-notch and I'd say my core Java skills are still pretty good. I still dabble with C when I need to.

 

[aramis]

I forgot to mention my favorite to program in: inform 6.

I'm thinking of doing a "Walk through Character Generator" - nothing but named one-way doors...

 

[whartung]

I forgot to mention my favorite to program in: inform 6.

I'm thinking of doing a "Walk through Character Generator" - nothing but named one-way doors...

That would be....different.

"You're in a maze of twisty DMs, all alike."

 

[aramis]

That would be....different.

"You're in a maze of twisty DMs, all alike."

code-wise, attributes and skills are just possessions; the DM's would be hidden...

The initial choice would be "Random roll or Point Build?"

Random roll would give the Attributes item with random numbers of Attribute.StrVal, Attribute.DexVal, Attribute.EndVal, etc.

More seriously, tho', Inform can also be used in a more normal, procedural (aka spaghetti code) manner, instead of the object and walker model that including the parser.lib and verb.lib gives. It's got a decent (and stupidly widely supported, even on legacy hardware) Virtual Machine. More machines support it than Java, especially since there's an inform player in Java...

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

code-wise, attributes and skills are just possessions; the DM's would be hidden...

The initial choice would be "Random roll or Point Build?"

Random roll would give the Attributes item with random numbers of Attribute.StrVal, Attribute.DexVal, Attribute.EndVal, etc.

More seriously, tho', Inform can also be used in a more normal, procedural (aka spaghetti code) manner, instead of the object and walker model that including the parser.lib and verb.lib gives. It's got a decent (and stupidly widely supported, even on legacy hardware) Virtual Machine. More machines support it than Java, especially since there's an inform player in Java...

I see I had an old version of Inform installed. Updated to a newer version. Don't ask me why I'm trying out .z5 files. My parser was much better, but I don't have that TANDY Color Computer III OS-9 computer anymore that ran it. Would like to do a Traveller-esque text adventure with Inform. Just have to build on what's there.

 

[Leitz]

I forgot to mention my favorite to program in: inform 6.

Well, i have to be honest, this looks really different. Interesting. Why not Inform 7?

Back to referencing Neverwinter Nights, I loved the idea of coding under the game but got distracted from it. Haven't looked deeply into PyGame but with a lot of game enabled languages this is starting to look even more interesting.

Would a story/text based game based on something like Inform be a fun project folks are interested in?

 

[aramis]

Well, i have to be honest, this looks really different. Interesting. Why not Inform 7?

Back to referencing Neverwinter Nights, I loved the idea of coding under the game but got distracted from it. Haven't looked deeply into PyGame but with a lot of game enabled languages this is starting to look even more interesting.

Would a story/text based game based on something like Inform be a fun project folks are interested in?

Inform 7 is no good for anything but IF , while Inform 6 is a robust environment; both produce exactly the same object code files run on the ZMachine, and there's even a zmachine available for the old Spectrum computer...

list inside

Spoiler

Amiga
Amstrad
Apple II
Atari ST
BeOS
DOS
GEM
Mac OS
Newton
Oric
OS/2
RISC OS
Spectrum
Unix
Windows
eBookman
EPOC
Gameboy
Helio
Nokia
PalmOS
Psion
TI
Windows CE
Wizard
Emacs
Java
Javascript

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I picked Inform 7 back in the day because of the clarity of the language, compared to version 6's. Looks easier to write up some Traveller: Interactive Fiction in the Far Future with version 7.

I'm coming from Python. So I prefer any "programming" to be easy to read/type, with no brackets/braces/semicolons/strange-symbols. And looking at the code, one can easily see what a program is doing.

 

[Adam Dray]

I struggled with IF7 to find the right syntax to do stuff. The natural language parser didn't always work the way you thought it should. I found I preferred a much more structured language for telling the computer what to do.

 

[ffilz]

I played a lot with Inform 6, but by the time Inform 7 had come out, I had drifted away from IF and didn't know about it until several years ago (part of that drift was a march of death at work in 2001 followed by a transfer from Raleigh NC to Portland OR and then actually getting face to face gaming going).

I have considered using Inform for general purpose programming, and a cool way to program for hand held devices (I have run Frotz on PalmOS and iOS, I forget if I ever got it up and going on WindowsCE, and maybe have or maybe not have on Android).

 

[aramis]

I played a lot with Inform 6, but by the time Inform 7 had come out, I had drifted away from IF and didn't know about it until several years ago (part of that drift was a march of death at work in 2001 followed by a transfer from Raleigh NC to Portland OR and then actually getting face to face gaming going).

I have considered using Inform for general purpose programming, and a cool way to program for hand held devices (I have run Frotz on PalmOS and iOS, I forget if I ever got it up and going on WindowsCE, and maybe have or maybe not have on Android).

There are Z-machine VM's for WinCE and Android.

For those curious, the way Inform7 works is that it compiles the highly stilted Inform 7 code to ugly but working Inform 6 code, and then compiles that to Z-code, which the Z-machine app then runs.

So the current compiler still supports natively Inform 6.

 

[ffilz]

There are Z-machine VM's for WinCE and Android.

Yea, I just don't remember if I actually installed on the WinCE hand held. I have not yet installed on my Android device.

Sadly, I lost my Palm Pilot on a hike... I kind of liked it...

I do pull up Zork every once in a while on my iPhone (I have the Infocom CD-ROM package that has all the games).

For those curious, the way Inform7 works is that it compiles the highly stilted Inform 7 code to ugly but working Inform 6 code, and then compiles that to Z-code, which the Z-machine app then runs.

So the current compiler still supports natively Inform 6.

Ah, ok, so I should probably just stick with Inform 6...

 

[Wintertree]

*sigh* I was running Traveller back in the days of the little black box. The Science Fiction Table Pack has a distinctly Traveller-y feel And in the 20+ years since then (admittedly with a 16-year gap in the middle when I gafiated for a bit and just never came back), I've never actually put in a feature to display numbers in hex format, as for a Traveller UPP. I don't know what I was (or wasn't) thinking.

One reason for that, of course, is that the SF Table Pack isn't Traveller-specific; it has the kinds of tables that a Traveller ref would find useful, because I've been a Traveller ref myself so I think that way when it comes to SF-themed tables, but for obvious intellectual property reasons, there's nothing actually for Traveller in there. They're mostly descriptive and such (grab the demo off my website if you want to see what some of the output looks like; it's got sample output for the table packs) rather than specific to any game. Players, of course, are free to write up any table they want, for any game they play, for themselves -- that's personal use. But I can't sell any such without a proper license, so I've never really added Traveller-specific features. But Traveller tables aren't the only reason one might need a result in hexadecimal, and I'd just never thought about it.

So ... well, reading this thread has made me think about it. I just added a new command to TableMaster this afternoon: .HEXIFY; it'll be in the next stable release.

Because of the way TableMaster tables work -- they're intended to be simple and obvious for non-programmers, not for the likes of us -- there are no functions, and the syntax looks more like COBOL than anything really should. .HEXIFY will work pretty much like this, if I don't change something before the release version:

: Demo table for Hexify
:
.VARIABLE {HexString} TEXT
.VARIABLE {HexTemp} TEXT
:
.TABLE test
.ERASE {HexString}
: first number
.ROLL <2d6>
.HEXIFY {$Roll} TO {HexTemp}
.JOIN {HexString} BEFORE {HexTemp}
: second number
.ROLL <2d6>
.HEXIFY {$Roll} TO {HexTemp}
.JOIN {HexString} BEFORE {HexTemp}
: (repeat previous 3 lines as many times as needed)
.PRINT Resulting hex string is {HexString}

(keywords are in upper case for aesthetic reasons; the table parser isn't case-sensitive; {$Roll} is a system variable that contains the last .ROLL result; lines starting with colons are of course comments)

Run it five times and you'll get a result like this:

Resulting hex string is 3B
Resulting hex string is 73
Resulting hex string is CA
Resulting hex string is 2A
Resulting hex string is 46

So, y'all can collectively thank yourselves for causing a new command to be added to TableMaster! Two, actually, because I'm playing around with a version of .JOIN (creatively called .ATTACH -- don't judge me, I'm a programmer, not a linguist) that basically is like .JOIN backwards; it'll just look better in some uses: .ATTACH somenewtext TO {TheString}

I never set out to write a programming language; I was actually rather startled when I realized that was essentially what I'd done. Kind of a weird and specialized language, but a language just the same. The fun thing about it, of course, is that if I see something that needs to be in there ... hey, I'm the designer, I can just go and add it!

So, thanks y'all. If it hadn't been for this discussion, there probably wouldn't have been .HEXIFY in TBL. Now there is.

 

[jaz0nj4ckal]

Coming from the network engineer side – it could be argued by some that I do not program, but create scripts. Either way – I use the following daily.

Perl
Python
TCL
Expect
BASH
Powershell (very limited)

C #when I feel brave and I want to make an app

I really like TCL, it is just very easy and creating GUI apps is super quick. In addition, SQLite was designed using it.

Also, I find most of ‘my’ scripts are done with Perl; however, I use Python for the API in Juniper and Cisco, but for some reason I really like Perl. Not sure if that is due to my start in C back in 1995, but I have not been able to get into Python as much as others have. It is nice don’t get me wrong, just does not tickle my programming bone. I think the latter is a personal hang-up, since I started with C and Perl, and can do pretty much all I need in those languages; however, if I was going to learn a new ‘learn’ today I would look into Java since it has a ton of libraries and products like Hadoop and Splunk.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Python is the easiest for me to type/run/test code in, compared to other languages I've used.

 

[aramis]

Python is the easiest for me to type/run/test code in, compared to other languages I've used. https://plus.google.com/photos/photo/108238709099957334707/6420917051395188258?icm=false

Python, C and Inform are my languages of choice.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Python, C and Inform are my languages of choice.

Do you do any Python extending using C? Or do you do C programming by itself? Or do you have Python being called/run by your C code?