
Are there any jobs using esoteric/less mainstream languages? - vram22
I&#x27;ve been browsing this list lately:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_programming_languages<p>and thought it would be interesting to do some work in some of them over time, since some of them have some unusual &#x2F; powerful features.
(Side projects can obviously be done, and I am doing one or two, but that is not my focus in this question.)<p>I know I can google for &quot;$LANGUAGE_NAME jobs&quot;, but am interested to hear if anyone knows such details about any of those languages outside the mainstream. Mainstream ones, I guess, would include COBOL (mainframes), Pascal (Delphi), Lisp(s) and Schemes, C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, C#, VB.NET and some others too, though feel to correct &#x2F; add &#x2F; etc. Sorry if I missed out anyone&#x27;s favorite language or one considered mainstream - I don&#x27;t know them all. (Not sure what Haskell &#x2F; Clojure &#x2F; Scala &#x2F; Erlang &#x2F; Elixir &#x2F; Golang count as, though I&#x27;ve read about usage of all of them in recent years, and some for longer.) Anyway, &quot;mainstream&quot; is subjective (but this is not StackOverflow, where they close such subjective questions as off-topic, so I&#x27;m hoping I&#x27;ll get some answers).<p>On a (not so) side note, if anyone here has done work in any of those non-mainstream languages, it would be interesting to hear about the projects too, if not confidential.<p>I&#x27;ve tried out at least a handful of non-mainstream languages in the past, but have not done any non-trivial project in them, that I can remember. Some of the ones I&#x27;ve tried are Forth, Elastic, Pike, and Icon.
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enkiv2
Some systems still use MUMPS in the medical field.

To the extent that people still develop expert systems, PROLOG is still used
in the development of such systems (and various AI projects like Watson use
PROLOG internally).

A lot of places rely heavily on R and/or Julia rather than Python or FORTRAN
for mathematical work these days (although I'd consider FORTRAN at least as
'mainstream' as COBOL if not more -- the difference is that COBOL tends to be
legacy _business_ code while FORTRAN tends to be legacy _academic_ code in the
hard sciences).

There used to be FORTH shops run by FORTH fanboys/gurus who did everything in
FORTH. Most of them may be gone, but they existed as recently as the late 90s.

Of course, within large organizations there are often groups who end up using
obscure languages or technologies for very specific things. The people I work
with write a lot of awk.

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vram22
Interesting info, thanks.

Cool about FORTH being used. Guessed it would be so about FORTRAN and COBOL.

Awk is great. Used to use it a fair amount for IT data conversion, munging,
cleaning, etc., along with other Unix tools like sed.

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vram22
Tried out Nim and Cobra briefly too, IIRC. Cobra is a bit like Python (and
maybe that is why the name :) Found it slightly unstable though - crashing now
and then.

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joelg
If I remember correctly, Autodesk still uses a Lisp in some of their products.

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vram22
Ah right, AutoLisp. I've used it a little, long ago, in AutoCAD. Not a CAD
designer myself. Just used it in a support role.

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detaro
There are a few companies shipping Smalltalk products.

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vram22
Thanks.

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orlandob
kdb+/q, apl, j for finance

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vram22
Thanks to all who answer.

