Please answer the poll to indicate which of these older languages is the coolest. Please try to be as subjective as possible. :] Replies justifying your decision, or making fun of the other languages, would be much appreciated.

"Ada was named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who is often credited as being the first computer programmer."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)

Now that's cool!

Please describe "cool". Usable? Funny? Awkward? Beautiful?

jlinkels

I think that 'cool' is like humor as far as this goes: If you try to explain it, you lose it.

I've programmed in a lot of languages, including a lot of Fortran and Pascal, some Cobol, but no Ada. I thought Ada was over designed and bloated.

Anyway, I think Pascal is the coolest of those. It was one of the early structured languages that tried to break away from the messy code of the earlier languages like Fortran and Cobol. It was the language of choice on the early VAX VMS systems. It was the language in which the first object oriented Mac OS was written. And it is the language that Donald Knuth originally chose to write TeX in. It was the most common teaching language for computer science for quite a while.

OK, in terms of beauty: Pascal

jlinkels

A long the same line of reasoning as bsdunix my choice would be COBOL. Grace Hopper helped developed the language and one of her claims to fame was making the term computer bug popular when she found a moth in a computer relay. Its somewhat personal since I heard her speak in person.

Maybe it should be which of this languages deserves a resurrection... for that Pascal gets my vote.

and what happened to Lisp and Forth ???

who makes a great 40 core processor?
IntellaSys

what language does it use native?
Forth

40 cores you say, no other language could work in such a demanding environment.

Coolest ...

Well I'm not sure Fortran is itself 'cool' - however, it has made a massive contribution in the history of 'numerical' science and engineering...

Solving huge mathematical problems in NASA, meteorology, seismic exploration, etc etc

So as a scientist I've gotta give it my vote for services to cool applications.

Steve

BTW Fortran is not just of historical interest - It is still recognised as one of the best
(easiest to write, and computationally v. efficient) for numerical applications.

My first language! being an engineer what else is there? OK, second coolest is assembler!! SO there.

Pascal is the only one of those which I have actually used, so my vote clearly goes to Pascal. We had a good time together, but it's graphics-routines were so damn slow...

I couldn't agree more!!

Cheers

In my early days I wanted to get a job programming in Fortran, as I liked mathematics and engineering.
But I ended up working with COBOL, in the financial business, where more jobs were available.
I never felt attracted to Pascal...

pascal it's the only one i've heard of [cringe]