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As long as I'm a user of a language, which pays my salary, and not the creator/designer of that language, there's nothing to be ashamed of. Each language has its own beauty and ugliness, and everything in this world is like that, isn't it?
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I was able to achieve "flow" with COBOL, so no.
PERFORM VARYING ... FROM ... BY ... UNTIL ...
versus
for (int i = 0; i ..) or
while ( ... )
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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It's ancient and dated, but I still have a fondness for hpl, Hewlett Packard's custom language for their early desktop computers. There was a lot that it couldn't do, but there were a couple of things it could do that made it perfect for its intended application. Back in the day, when we had RAM measured in kbits, programs had to be very short. In hpl we had the command chain that would save the program state and start a new program where the first left off. This essentially allowed programs to be written that were far larger than the machine could accommodate, up to the limit of the disk space available.
A second feature made my in-house reputation as an engineer soar; the keyboard key, store was storable, and could be executed at runtime. Since I was developing automated missile test software and hardware meant to be used in a noisy factory environment, ambient electrical noise was a constant problem. I wrote a code block that I used in almost all applications that would measure the local noise, run an FFT on the samples, create a custom filter subroutine to remove that noise, then add the resulting filter program to the actual test program as a pre-processor on the measured data. The accuracy of testing was vastly improved.
Sadly, hpl met with an untimely death, like all good things, it seems. Unlike every other popular language at the time, its instruction set was entirely lower case, which mainline programmers couldn't accept. If it wasn't written in capital letters, it couldn't possibly be any good. By the time HP introduced the HP9845 desktop computer, hpl became optional, and HPBasic replaced it as standard. Things kinda went downhill after that...
Will Rogers never met me.
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I am NOT ashamed of this language it was my go to for my Palm Pilot
NS Basic
I often wonder if anyone here ever used this dialect of Basic ?
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VB6 and VBA, have actually created some really cool apps for automating hardware tests, real time fft displays, animated data plots, etc. My former employer still uses VBA code I wrote nearly 20 years ago in Excel as convenience apps for myself as part of new product performance validation for FDA approvals. 
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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I loved MS Visual Basic v3.
It was my first exposure to GUI programming. VB was the gateway drug of coding.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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honey the codewitch wrote: For me it would definitely be VB6
Upvoted for being courageous enough to admit this here or on any coder's forum! 
I agree 100% with you. VB6 might be old and ugly but as long as MS is shipping the runtimes with the OS, those executables will live on and some developers will continue to support those products/projects.
I came back to programming in the late 90s and got my first job doing VB6/Classic ASP development. To keep a long story short, I am still at that company and we still lots of active VB6 projects. (likely > 1M LOC across 2 largish apps and 100 or so 'add-on modules') Those apps are getting migrated as time allows which means very slowly! 
In the past I've hired 2 jr. developers for migration only, but neither worked out. Perhaps I just haven't found the right one...or I'm impossible to work with.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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If you're still using VB6 and you want to make your apps pretty check this site out
vbAccelerator.com - Advanced VB, C# and VB.NET Source Code and Controls[^]
He produces some quality controls for VB6 with professional look and feel. It's aces. I learned a lot back in the day from just looking at his code.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Windows Batch.
It's my dirty little secret.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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I loved Visual FoxPro. Fast, easy to use, great community.
MS killed it to force VFP developers to move to SQL Server.
Good business move for MS. A shame for everyone else.
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I liked the language of FoxPro 2.6 for DOS. Unfortunately it died a lot with "corruption detected" on a network where Clipper 87 marched like a Roman legion.
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Why and for what should I be ashamed here? I've been able to pay my bills and live a good life with it all these years.
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I still love Perl and use it almost every day - for everything from system administration to web applications. None of the reasons that the industry typically gives for decrying it seem to affect me: I can still read code that I wrote ten years ago.
<°}}}>«<
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Not really. I know JS fanboys wanted me to be ashamed about AS3 for years, but it made web development exciting and fun and it was similar to Java/C# so it made it easier for me to get into .Net after it was no longer popular. Ah... good times.
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This is a wonderful question. Really Wonderful.
I love all the responses to it as well.
In some ways it it is like a confessional.
I feel a bit vindicated now.
I am not embarrassed by any language that I've used.
I started very early and have used most of them.
Like you one of the best times was to see if VB6 couldn't do something.
Like you, that is where I learnt to be dirty. All the WIN32 stuff.
Could do anything that I wanted.
It was so much fun. Maybe wasn't as fast as the same in C or C++ of whatever brand alternative.
But It was a challenge. I did that also.
I, We always got there in the end.
It was such fun.
Especially where we were told that NO you can't do that with VB6.
And then we did.
We could do anything.
I forget most of it now.
Forget Fortran but came back to it later and continued, I loved it, but years ago now.
Forget Pascal, Delphi, C, C++ Borland, and all of the basic systems since day dot.
Just do C# or VB.net now.
Devs have always been critical of certain languages.
I can understand.
VB in all forms is a classic hate language.
It has ON ERROR RESUME NEXT.
Allows Goto and Gosub.
However it allows free memory so you could make your own IO boards to stick in your computer.
Then the OS changed to memory protected.
That very thing changed the world. Not in a good way at first but later it did.
I hear devs putting sh*t on all different languages.
My favourite was an add from Pornhub advertising positions for PHP programmers.
The PHP dev answered: I am Interested but I don't think I'd be comfortable telling my friends and family that's what I do all day.
Answer: That is understandable. I don't think I would be comfortable telling may family that I develop PHP either.
Look There is no embarrassing language.
Some are good and some are not so much.
They are all there for a purpose though.
The purpose is to get things done. Properly.
We all do that.
Hopefully.
I can understand why devs criticise VB6, but like Nagy Vilmos says, done well it was (Translated from Hungarian) the Bees Nees, Done bad it was DDay.
I love it all.
Love you.
"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Frank Zappa 1980
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Clipper 87. The REAL language integrated query.
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I guess I’d have to say Basic. First learned in high school in late 70’s. After that learned more DEC Basic in college and first job that I had that paid enough for me to move out of my parents house was also using DEC Basic. Used Turbo Basic, Quick Basic, MS Basic, VB For DOS (that was interesting), VBA in Access, VB5 (briefly), VB6, and VB.Net. Now I’m using C# and I really am enjoying it.
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I'll join you on that one. You could go from proof of concept to prototype to MVP in no time. We pushed the limits and pushed Access as well. Access got to be an issue because it required more and more hardware to handle the size and web stuff; switched to Postgres using VB6 
I still have purview over a VB6 base, though coding is left to someone else. It still plays nicely though its days are numbered since it's easier to maintain web-based for inter/intranet applications.
I have to admit I still miss the printing interface. It was so easy to generate business documents and it didn't require one to be a point and pixel artist, lol.
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Visual Basic 6 was very fun back when I began my software development career. I even did a little DirectX work with it. I'm not really ashamed of it because of the power it had in the end. One of these weekends I'll see if I can reinstall it and play with it again for old times sake.
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Never. As long as it solves the problem it's ok for me. 
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A long time ago at a company that no longer exists...
Lotus created an office suite successor to their wildly popular MS-DOS-based Lotus 123 spreadsheet called Symphony. A customer had a group of 123 spreadsheets that they used to manage engineering processes, parts flows, and the like. Since these were separate files, they loaded sheets in a sequence, computed values, then manually entered those values in successor sheets. As you can imagine, this was very error-prone.
I created a menu system and an overlay[^] manager in Symphony macros. I don't remember too many details, other than it seemed very elegant at the time. Macro code lived in the sheet and you could mix formula cells in your macros, which would then 'execute' the value of the formula. Great fun, if a horrific abuse of a macro language.
Software Zen: delete this;
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ig-Pay atin-lay
Sorry.
Never ashamed. Each language gave new insights - some better than others, others provided examples of what not to do.
Time is the differentiation of eternity devised by man to measure the passage of human events.
- Manly P. Hall
Mark
Just another cog in the wheel
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Nope. Every language I've used was useful for the purpose I used it.
Intel x86 Assembly
Motorola 6502 Assembly
IBM BAL (Assembly)
IBM JCL
APL
Forth
C
C++ with and without MFC (I wrote SetiDriver in C++ with MFC)
C#
DOS/CMD Scripting
VB6
VBA
VB.Net
Java
CLU
Prolog (dabbled but never used heavily)
Windows Scripting Host via VBScript
PowerShell
Clipper
Access Basic
T-SQL
Pascal
DEC DCL
DEC Basic
SuperNova (pure OO language that I hated - not ashamed but hated)
There are a few more that I've forgotten.
modified 6-Nov-23 9:25am.
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