Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

Unfortunately there's no one thing that I can point to that makes Delphi the best, its a lot of little things - the IDE and screen painter, the way you can use pointers, deployment is so easy with a single exe, RAD. The one language I prefer to delphi is typescript, it is Delphi with a lot of functional sugar, but since its written by the same guy probably not a surprise.

    There is a whole lot of action at a distance. 
    Consider this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere.

    There is a whole lot of action at a distance. 
    Consider this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere:

    @fopen('http://example.com/not-existing-file', 'r');

    What will it do?

    If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won’t work. 
    (Docs don’t say what “won’t work” means; returns null, throws exception?) 
    Note that this flag was removed in PHP 5.2.5.

    If allow_url_fopen is disabled in php.ini, this still won’t work. 
    (How? No idea.)
    Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed.
    
    But it will be printed if scream.enabled is set in php.ini.
    Or if scream.enabled is set manually with ini_set.
    But not if the right error_reporting level isn’t set.
    If it is printed, exactly where it goes depends on display_errors, again in php.ini. Or ini_set.

That's not what they're saying. If someone knows a tool and it works for them, then it's more immediately useful than another tool which they don't yet know how to use, or how well it works.

> The truth is that there are much better alternatives which are a lot more pleasant to use and will get the job done in a much better way.

Quantify "better". PHP has its flaws (quite a lot of them), but it also has its advantages. It's a very popular language, so if you want to do something with it, almost certainly someone else has tried to do the same thing, so there will be libraries for it, guides, people who you can ask for help if you have trouble. It has a shared-nothing architecture, which aids scalability. It has extensive documentation. It has a large selection of battle-tested frameworks. There is an almost infinite selection of hosting providers.

> This is a myth. Php is not easy to use. May be, It is easy to start.

PHP's flaws can make it an occasional pain, but it is not really harder to use than any other ALGOL-like language. It is sometimes easier as it tends to expose simple interfaces to things, rather than requiring the user deal with a lot of complexity.

> But you need to know a lot of useless stuff (outside the context of Php), to get anything to work any where near reliably.

This is, to some extent, true for other languages as well. But yes, I'd agree with you here that PHP has more baggage than its contemporaries.

> Also, be prepared to write a lot more automated tests if you want to keep it that way.

This is true of dynamic languages generally. Though PHP has (limited, runtime) type-checking, which can reduce the burden here somewhat.

Sure they'd prefer someone with a decade or five of experience, but seriously: COBOL coders are literally dying off at this point. 17 years ago was the last great hurrah for hiring & training COBOL developers, averting the "Y2K crisis" before calendars ticked over to the year 2000; we've got kids born after that who are entering the software workforce now. About 5 years ago I had someone speak in my C++ class begging students to consider a career in "mainframe" technologies; there was virtually no interest shown, and methinks most of the students didn't even know what he was talking about.

But...the need remains. Those systems are so large & profitable they're not going anywhere, and employers must be quite willing to take on new coders willing to learn, directing & funding their education as needed. If you're interested, contact a hiring company directly and ask - even if you have 0 of 10 years required experience.

There's a lot of smoke and noise made about how companies are desperate for COBOL developers because the old ones are retiring or dying blah blah blah, but I've never seen actual good salaries to back it up. And to add insult to injury, you're unlikely to be able to take the skills you've learned to your next job when you inevitably change jobs.

You're better off going towards other enterprise technology stacks with more action and rewards.

And, to be entirely honest, most of the gripes above are likely more due to the poorly designed API than to the language itself.

PHP is the dynamic language cousin of C/C++. PHP7 and HHVM are both great and fast.

I'd be very curious to know what technique you used here.

I sort of stumbled on Forth recently, and while I'm not sure if I'll do anything with it, I like the philosophy behind it more than any other language I've yet found.

Getting a job here, where I would program in CL is nearly impossible. So in the next years I'll probably stay in the academic world and then try to do my own startup or freelance stuff with the language(s) I like.

Is this a typo? It seems like two instances of the same thing

Interesting blog post from last year on someone's experiences developing an application in Object Pascal: http://ziotom78.blogspot.com/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-...

Free Pascal itself: http://www.freepascal.org/

The Archive.org crawl is way too old to be of any use. And the Common Crawl corpus is only marginally bigger than what I crawl myself. There are currently just over a billion pages in my search-index and I can recrawl those about every 45 days. Crawling right now at about 650 URLs/s and 200mbit/s. Only about 60% of URLs crawled end up in the index. The rest are errors, timeouts, redirections, etc.

I have been thinking about adding an API. Rate-limiting is a must as you have correctly said. I'm already in a constant fight against SEOs who try to scrape the search-results and who apparently don't see anything wrong in making 10+ queries/second.

The API would definitly not be a free-for-all, but sort of like "send me an email and describe what you want to do with it, and if I like it I'll give you an API-key".Together with a primer on what not to do of course. :) If people do more than a certain amount of queries/month, then it would also have to be paid.