Which programming language for MSFS

[Bigbluss 304]

9 hours ago, Mike S KPDX said:

... that's we have come too - essentially writing in HTML.

coding, a lost art.

What a silly thing to say

[bofhlusr 453]

1 hour ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Too funny!  After graduating from CSUH with CS/Math degree I was hired by a small company to migrate their PC COBOL product over to VB and then later .NET.  If you think C++ has A LOT of compiler directives, COBOL compiler was a nightmare of switches ... I learnt COBOL in University but I honestly never thought I'd need it in the real world, I was wrong.

My favorite language is still Pascal, then VB ... never really like C# or C++, but oddly I liked C.  FORTRAN was a language I never used in the real world.  Assembler language was very interesting, really liked it, but so much work to get so little done.

...

Pascal was the introductory programming language preferred way back then by professors. My first formal language was FORTRAN 77. My favorite "language" was dBase and all it's derivatives (xBase, Clipper, etc.). For interpreters I liked Rexx batch and unix scripting; and wished I spent time learning awk, Perl and Lua.

[TacomaSailor 191]

My first programming job was in Manhattan in 1969 - we were converting the BlueCross/BlueShield customer information and billing system from AutoCoder (developed in late '50s) to the more modern COBOL.   The job was tedious but we (all recent college graduates, all single, half male, half female) were each provided a high end apartment and generous expense account while living there for six-months.  That was my introduction to "for hire" programming and eventually led me to own my own consulting company.

26-years later I was still teaching programmers how to optimize COBOL/VSAM systems and code. 

My 2nd job was contract FORTRAN programming for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center.  I loved FORTRAN and later paid my way thru graduate school writing FORTRAN data analysis and statistics packages for my university.  I was taking graduate level statistics courses but my professor refused to let me do any of my course work on the computer and insisted I be an expert at using a Marchant mechanical calculator and, with a later upgrade, a WANG programmable statistics machine.

As late as 2000 I was still helping COBOL and FORTRAN programmers adjust to the new online world.

And, I did program in machine language on five different systems from a DEC PDP/8 to an Interdata/16 all the way up to an IBM/360 which talked to a IBM 7090.  My eventual BS in CS was focused on operating systems and performance enhancement.

But - in the mid-70's I was convinced PL/1 was the future and I became an expert in that oddity but soon realized no one cared.!

 

 

[TacomaSailor 191]

1 hour ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I seem to recall one of our assignments was to code a parser

... Balloon Sort! in QuickTran - in my first university programming class

[omarsmak30 4,068]

Oh boy you guys talking about COBOL and FORTRAN, I feel so young now 😅. 

[Mace 1,926]

They taught us COBOL, and that was in 1991-95 time period.

Actually they started us on Modula (or was it Modula-2).

Bubble sort.  Shell sort.  I have forgotten most of the stuff we programmed.

[Paul J 349]

8 minutes ago, omarsmak30 said:

Oh boy you guys talking about COBOL and FORTRAN, I feel so young now 😅. 

Yeah - but we old guys have all the money . .   🤑

[Mace 1,926]

6 minutes ago, omarsmak30 said:

Oh boy you guys talking about COBOL and FORTRAN, I feel so young now 😅. 

'cause you are indeed a mere stripling.  But hey, I'm only in my 40's.  I might be the youngest person who ever learned COBOL.  Maybe.

Even at the time, I had my doubts I would use it, but that was the curriculum.

[TheFamilyMan 280]

Cut my programming teeth on assembler back in the late '70s.  Over my 35 year career, programmed buckets of it, along with C, Fortran, C++, Perl, Java, Python, LabView, and enough GUI building and scripting languages to make your head spin, but since it all was done in a classified environment at a major aerospace corporation, if I revealed any more details I'd have to kill you all 😉.

Edited October 27, 2021 by TheFamilyMan

[bofhlusr 453]

32 minutes ago, TheFamilyMan said:

Cut my programming teeth on assembler back in the late '70s.  Over my 35 year career, programmed buckets of it, along with C, Fortran, C++, Perl, Java, Python, LabView, and enough GUI building and scripting languages to make your head spin, but since it all was done in a classified environment at a major aerospace corporation, if I revealed any more details I'd have to kill you all 😉.

Now you're making me wonder how many text editors you've gone through.

Other than my first, Xedit on vm/cms, I can't even keep track how many I've used over time.

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

I did IBM mainframe assembler and Pascal Waterloo. Now those were the days. I am glad I don't have to write any lines of code today. 

[Paul J 349]

(sigh)   MASM, v1.something, purchased in 1985......  then Nantucket's Clipper III..  I still have C on 5-1/4" floppies . . only arthritis in my wrists, and continuous brain fog prevents further mutterings about this new object-oriented stuff. . .darned new-fangled editors.. 
But I reckon Rod takes the biscuit here... He remembers morse and semaphore . . .

Edited October 27, 2021 by Paul J

[Highmike 68]

I was a clerical assistant in the computer room of the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1973. I mostly ran errands for the operators and supported the running of the facility, but I always fancied myself as a programmer.

Back then it was something to be a programmer but nowadays nearly everyone with a computer has some experience with coding, if only writing .bat files in DOS.

But with the internet now, and HTML and javascript being so accessible, there are a lot of coders out there. What used to be a tiny fraction back in the '70s is now an avalanche of people having fun with a variety of their devices.

I don't write code professionally but I manage my own website, I frequently update my version of Visual Studio (which is free for an individual like me), and android java gives me a literally handy solution to nearly any programming problem I can think of.

If gauge programming is now as simple as HTML and javascript then there's nothing to stop someone who wants to contribute more to our hobby.

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

My first Programming language was Fortran 4 on punch cards for a PDP8 .

[BlueStar 323]

On 10/27/2021 at 12:44 AM, Rob_Ainscough said:

Too funny!  After graduating from CSUH with CS/Math degree I was hired by a small company to migrate their PC COBOL product over to VB and then later .NET.  If you think C++ has A LOT of compiler directives, COBOL compiler was a nightmare of switches ... I learnt COBOL in University but I honestly never thought I'd need it in the real world, I was wrong.

My favorite language is still Pascal, then VB ... never really like C# or C++, but oddly I liked C.  FORTRAN was a language I never used in the real world.  Assembler language was very interesting, really liked it, but so much work to get so little done.

Depends on what you plan to do (your projects):

• SimConnect (or managed SimConnect) and language you like (out of process but not thread-safe) ... I have a feeling SimConnect will eventually get deprecated
• WASM then it's C++ with restriction (NanoVG API) on what you can access/do (in process)
• HTML5, JavaScript gauges (via Coherent GT)
• Data manipulation with text files, structure files, XML files, JSON files
• Graphics files .DDS, .PNG, 3DSMax files for Airport/Scenery/Aircraft 
• Probably a few more I forgot

The latest 0.15 SDK and documentation is much improved, definitely worth a read from start to finish if you just getting into this part of MSFS.

Cheers, Rob.

 

I'm using JULIA now for all my economic models.   For what I do it is much better than "C" and it's derivates.   When I went to JULIA it took almost a year to get my models moved from "C".  The thing I liked about COBOL was the ability to do the sorts in the JCL.  For fun I always liked Basic which is a lot more powerful than folks think.  I was never very good with Assembler, but worked with some folks that were really fast with it and could do just about anything with it.