Forth

 

actually any language with good documentation so it can be debugged properly.

 

Forth

Forth is cool. Always wanted to write a Fourth interpreter for PIC.

 

Forth

It's on the bottom of my list. At work I'm the only guy who understands the motion control programs written in Forth and can write implant control programs for the old robotic systems that still have embedded Forth interpreters running on Z80 controllers from the 1980s.
Ugly.

 

It's on the bottom of my list. At work I'm the only guy who understands the motion control programs written in Forth and can write implant control programs for the old robotic systems that still have embedded Forth interpreters running on Z80 controllers from the 1980s.
Ugly.

I guess I have a thing for minimalism.

 

It's on the bottom of my list. At work I'm the only guy who understands the motion control programs written in Forth and can write implant control programs for the old robotic systems that still have embedded Forth interpreters running on Z80 controllers from the 1980s.
Ugly.

You probably won't like this 6502 emulator, programmable in Forth, built in Minecraft then:

http://hackaday.com/2012/05/20/building-a-6502-in-minecraft/

 

"My favorite programming language is solder"
-- B. Pease & S. Ciarcia

What they said!

 

I guess I have a thing for minimalism.

I was all for minimalism when the CPU world lived in 64K but it's 2015 and life is too short.

 

I was all for minimalism when the CPU world lived in 64K but it's 2015 and life is too short.

Are you suggesting that life is too short to have fun? Especially at work?

 

Are you suggesting that life is too short to have fun? Especially at work?

I have plenty of fun designing and building things using modern tools, supporting old equipment is a chore when the guys who originally programmed it have retired years ago and we have to buy parts from EBAY to keep it running.

 

There was a time when it was worth the trouble to keep old systems running strong. I think that time has passed.

 

There was a time when it was worth the trouble to keep old systems running strong. I think that time has passed.

It's a double-edged sword. The modern replacement cost is several million each so as long as our group keeps them going by finding ways to make them work in ways the original designers never dreamed of, going the bean-counters for new toys is impossible. I do admire the engineering work that went into them but the reliability curve is so far on the downside even the LEDs in old optoelectronic systems are starting to fail and the software is a patched mess.
http://images.caeonline.com/im.php?id=452946

 

After starting this poll, I realized that using the top 9 programming languages on TIOBE wasn't a good idea. PHP and Javascript have nothing to do with electronics as far as I know.

I would like to edit the poll now, but I don't see any option to do that. I wonder if a forum admin would be able to?

I think the choices should be changed to:

1. C
2. C++
3. C#
4. Fortran
5. Java
6. Matlab
7. Python
8. Perl
9. Assembly
   
10. Other (please post what it is)

(The first eight are all mentioned on the main page of the Programming Corner forum.) This wouldn't change the results of the poll, since all of the choices that have been selected would still be there.

If no one has the capability of editing it, maybe I should start a new poll and request all of the users who answered this one to answer the new one as well.

EDIT: I changed my mind, see my next post on Page 3.

 

If no one has the capability of editing it, maybe I should start a new poll and request all of the users who answered this one to answer the new one as well.

Why? How will the results be used?

John

 

Why? How will the results be used?

Mainly just to satisfy curiosity. I also thought it would help give me an idea of what the best programming language would be for me to learn next.

But now that a good number of members have answered the poll, I suppose starting a new one wouldn't be worthwhile. I still wonder if a forum admin/moderator could edit the existing one?

 

Why? How will the results be used?

John

Ditto. You have a fundamentally meaningless poll of which the results are completely meaningless. This is the nature of "self-selective surveys". The representative answers are those that would have been provided by the overwhelming fraction of people that chose NOT to answer the poll!

Just consider this -- different languages vary differently in how ardent their supporters are. So someone that programs in one of languages with a zealous following is probably much more likely to participate in any poll that let's them tout their religion compared to someone that programs in a language that is simply a language that people use for such and such. That's going to skew your results in unpredictable ways.

While the specific numbers differ from source to source, I have generally heard it said that even if a poll has zero selection bias (meaning that the people that have the opportunity to take the poll actually are representative of the entire population) that unless at least 75% of the people presented with the option to take a poll actually do, that it is almost guaranteed that the effect of self-selection bias will render the results uninterpretable.

 

Mainly just to satisfy curiosity. I also thought it would help give me an idea of what the best programming language would be for me to learn next.

But now that a good number of members have answered the poll, I suppose starting a new one wouldn't be worthwhile. I still wonder if a forum admin/moderator could edit the existing one?

It will not give you much of an idea -- at least not one that has any meaning. The worst part about self-selective surveys is that they make you think you know something when you actually don't -- that's actually LESS knowledge than you had when you knew you didn't know anything!

As for "a good number of members...." Let's see -- 13 people have responded to your poll and AAC currently has 252,489 members. Now, that's admittedly unfair because the overwhelming number of members are long gone. But there are 42 members online right now as I type. So how many members -- probably hundreds -- have reasonably had the opportunity to participate in your poll and chose not to?

 

It will not give you much of an idea -- at least not one that has any meaning. The worst part about self-selective surveys is that they make you think you know something when you actually don't -- that's actually LESS knowledge than you had when you knew you didn't know anything!

As for "a good number of members...." Let's see -- 13 people have responded to your poll and AAC currently has 252,489 members. Now, that's admittedly unfair because the overwhelming number of members are long gone. But there are 42 members online right now as I type. So how many members -- probably hundreds -- have reasonably had the opportunity to participate in your poll and chose not to?

I see your point. "A good number of members" wasn't a good choice of words. I meant a large enough number that it wouldn't seem worthwhile to redo the poll.

I suppose the ability to create polls on this forum isn't very useful, since all polls have a bias. Still, the popularity of C and Python in the poll seems reasonable, since they are popular programming languages generally.

 

I see your point. "A good number of members" wasn't a good choice of words. I meant a large enough number that it wouldn't seem worthwhile to redo the poll.

I suppose the ability to create polls on this forum isn't very useful, since all polls have a bias. Still, the popularity of C and Python in the poll seems reasonable, since they are popular programming languages generally.

Yep, the ability to create polls isn't useful at all -- except that people largely don't know or really care that they are getting negative knowledge form a poll, they just love being able to do a poll and get a warm fuzzy. What's particularly sad is the increasing (and it's a trend that's been going on for decades) use of highly self-selective surveys for serious work and the people doing them truly have no idea that their data is fundamentally worthless.

I'm also not surprised that C and Python rank up there. It's not at all uncommon for self-selective polls to be in coarse agreement with strong general sentiment. But that doesn't tell you anything about the validity of the poll.

 

...PHP and Javascript have nothing to do with electronics as far as I know...

The hell you say! My documentation control and RMA systems, as well as much of my production data/analysis is done with PHP on a LAMP stack. Wrote it all myself.