Over the past several months my interests returned to Java again after having essentially abandoned the language for several years. Back in 2004 I worked on a Web site that was composed of mostly servlets. I swore I wouldn't do J2EE again because it was simply too much code to program something really simple.

A few months ago I encountered a Java EE framework that I was impressed for so little code I need to write. It really changed my impression of Java EE and I think I have found a really good way to do Web applications.

I also do Perl, PHP and some C/C++ (though I tend to pretend I don't know C/C++ because I haven't written anything substantial for at least 7 years).

As long as i still did write programs i liked the "down to the bare metal" approach. I was gladly writing in assembly, FORTRAN/77 and thought of C as a great tool for rapid prototyping. I also knew my way around JCL and REXX. Object orientation was for quiche-eaters.

The only part which survived the years is the last: i still think object orientation is a big hype and 95% of the so-called object-oriented software could well have been written in a structured manner without any adverse effect. Most probably is, because - as the saying goes - you can write FORTRAN programs in any language: a lot of programmers still write ordinary C programs and the only thing ++ is the compiler.

In the last ten years i wrote solely in shell scripting languages. I prefer ksh over any other shell but can be patched to work with Bourne shell too. I dislike csh for its bugridden job control and other shortcomings and i dislike bash (no technical reason, just a matter of taste).

bakunin

I was expecting that, after reading your comparison SCSI vs. IDE , no offense, just a light joke.

I'm with bakunin - GNU often overdoes bells and whistles. ksh is better, maybe in my case because I can't do "cute" things like add "seq" to further increase code obscurity.

The issue I have is porting scripts. We have old highly obfuscated Bourne shell scripts and I'm the only one with enough patience to diddle them into working when we migrate.
Even a minor change of OS release hoses these darned things.

I started C back in the 1970's when there was an explosion of languages, most of which have been relegated to the junk heap. However, I stuck with C, COBOL, assembler and whatever job control language was around. Due to lack of imagination I think. Went off on a tangent into VMS internals for a while, mostly assembler, then got back into unix in the late 1990's.

Where the languages thing got out of hand for me was in database 4GL's and 'languages' like PL/SQL and IDML. Those things have been like a blur. I worked for one company that was into the 'database du jour' concept and it was hell. Fortunately, with the exception of Oracle products, I've completely forgotten them... Mumps, Progress, Userbase, InTouch, ad nauseum. All of the marginal players in the database game.

Maybe the one or other likes the lighter side of this discussion. Here's something i stumbled across in my younger days:

Programming languages are like women

bakunin

bakunin gave a great idea Programming languages are like women. How about analogies for other languages like bash, php, sql, tcl, python, perl, java?

I challenge era to give an analogy for perl, mcnamara for bash, sysgate for tcl, cbkihong for java.

I'll try giving one for python.

Go, go, go!

Perl? She's been with so many guys and each of them spoke a different language, so she's forgotten half of English and speaks in a weird mixture of Chinese, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Finnish, Xhosa, Tamil, and Mongolian (some of which sounds a lot like swearing, but once you figure it out, you'll see that it's actually rather expressive and cultured). Any food you throw at her, she'll cook into something which is considered edible in some part of the world, and often, you'll find that her pickled dachshund or maggot stew is a lot better than you thought it would be, but a lot of people are too prejudiced to try. Her library is full of weird books about exotic things, but sometimes, you find that the promising-looking pamphlet about genetic algorithms (in Turkish, by the way) was written by someone who knows less about the subject than you do. She's good at solving riddles, though sometimes, the answer she gives is a lot more imaginative than what you had in mind.