@streakmachine Microfocus’s VisualCobol dev env looks really productive. And you can target JVM or CLR (.NET) with it.
I’m really curious how it fits into the modern world - its jam was fixed format file processing. I don’t know what requirements outside legacy interop would lead you to choose COBOL today.
Meanwhile, modern FORTRAN is like compiled Matlab on steroids. That I can see choosing on its own merits for new work.
/@matigo
@streakmachine Modern Fortran is really cool. https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortran
/@matigo
@matigo I was just complaining about the same thing. I feel like they’ve hit a tipping point. I now groan when I’m sent a YouTube link.
@streakmachine Today’s Advent of Code challenge (day 18) uses the Smalltalk operator precedence rules for math expressions. Now if I could just work out what to send the lines to to have them eval’d…
@matigo Serves them right for only filing at monthly granularity. 🤷🏽
(I’m now on some weird “every Friday but also every 15th and last day of the month” thing that was so odd I had to drop down to handwriting the RRULES for the VEVENT to get it right. Then import into GCal.)
@streakmachine I’d check out Pharo [pharo.org] too. http://www.deepintopharo.com/ gets into some of its cool stuff.
I’m tempted to do Smalltalk for AoC next year. But not sure the autocomplete will match my expectations. Feeling burned by that with Mercury this year. I spend so much time fighting compiler errors - and they don’t even have column and range info, so it takes close reading, too.
The Internet is still amazing. My totally noob syntax question to the Mercury Language users list got a reply with some historical context from the author of The Craft of Prolog. I feel like I asked how to write a C character escape and Kernighan answered. 🤩