I do like Scala - it's expressiveness is great, the libs (like ZIO) are awesome, and it benefits from the whole JVM ecosystem

ReScript! The joy of OCaml’s type system without its weird syntax.

APL (kidding) - actual source code:

clojure, nix, emacs (if any of those can really be considered underrated)

Mediawiki.

Github? No, put up a wiki somewhere.

StackOverflow? No, put up a wiki somewhere.

Whatever automatic-"documentation"-generator-based-on-comments-of-the-week is? No, put up a wiki somewhere.

Reinvent the wheel? No, just use Mediawiki.

Really, juŝt put u̷̟̱̙̺̺̮͌̃̒̍͗̓͝͝p Å w̴̛̱̍̾̂̀̑̀̅͗͌͛͂͘͝iki sǫ̴̼̤̯̮̞̺̜̠̯̺̩̂͑̉̐̇̀mew̶̧̧̢̛̳͎͍̗͇̤̿̈́̓̎͆̂̇́̄̓́̿̓͠heŗ̵̡͔̬͇̜̖̰̔̏̅̃́͐̕̕͜͠ͅe

6502 assembly

JQuery. Maybe it’s just because JQuery eased me into JavaScript more generally in the early 2010’s, but I still use jquery all the time when I’m just messing around and find it just really easy and delightful to use for simple tasks and single-file/small web prototypes

Reflection/attributes were one of the more interesting things I've dealt. It's not something that should be applied to most problems, but it definitely has its uses.

This is such a dumb take, but ColdFusion. Which I guess is technically still around. But I started in web design and the similar syntax always seems elegant to me. Obviously not important in today’s programming world, but… I always dug the idea.

i wish elixir was less niche

i wish protobuf was universally adopted instead of fuckin json

I got a soft spot in my heart for ADA.

The HTML tag.

Ain't nothing wrong with MySQL

roborally

Lua.

SQL is underrated by engineers, and worshipped by MBAs

PHP 👑

Constantly laughed at for not being serious or high-level enough. 10 years ago, every coding “academy” was teaching Ruby. That was the future of web programming languages.

Flash forward to now: Ruby is barely around and PHP is still going strong. It is the perfect web programming language.

I wouldn't say underrated, but many developers do not appropriately use all the available tools. For example for a hackathon I implemented Python objects in C to dramatically improve performance of a lexical analyzer.

Oh cool, I got the hashtag update!

Dog, JavaScript is underrated, it’s great. There’s a reason that after 5 years there are still basically no WASM UI frameworks: JS is great

Also OCaml is cool

#software

Bash

Tie. Hourglasses, and anything traditional-ish.

Redstone.

Imagine what kind of world we’d live in, if everything was built with Minecraft’s redstone. Truly the next step for humanity.

mdb, the solaris debugger

Occam. Bring back occam!

In a world with massive multiprocessing, treat your cores as transputers!

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/3319/PRG43.pdf

C++ is objectively good and nobody uses it anymore, fair criticism though it's difficult to use because you can metaphorically have it build a model house and then give it a hammer and smash it to pieces

PowerShell is super nifty! It's useful for Windows developers because you can run basic commands, write full blown scripts, and it's super well supported. It makes modifying any Windows OS setting braindead easy.

This may sounds weird but I think it’s CSS technology. I still meet cases when developers use some programming tricks to resolve cases instead of using couple of CSS code lines. In these latter days we have a lot of new modern CSS that can make devs life easier.

WebExtensions are very cool and I think the web platform's gigantic API surface area only makes it more amenable to modding in this way.

I think ease of modification is in many cases more important than something being open-source, for maximising practical user freedom (of course, both are good)

I think plain C is underrated and I'd like to see more vulnerabilities written with it. oops I meant software

Rust.

(This is a shitpost. Shhh.)

Smalltalk. Prettiest language ever written, and powerful when you know how to use it.

Writing a real project in Go taught me how differently I think about software when concurrency is a first-class citizen, and that has been absolutely invaluable.

sqlite❤️

BASIC

Make a video game in 3 seconds

AWK it’s the party language

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Andrew_WK-8_%2842987819594%29.jpg

PWAs! RN is great but I have a hard time believing how unjust the dev industry have been to PWAs and with apple throwing a fit over it every other quarter, I dont have big hopes of it catching the hype train which is sad

This (I come from a computational physics background; a fair amount of intensive numerical code is written in modern Fortran):

https://bsky.app/profile/stephenwebb.bsky.social/post/3kmogf5g77i2i

PWAs!

Flash. It served a useful purpose and has never been adequately replaced. Example - we’ve see destruction of a lot of kid-focused internet spaces as part of the fallout from its death. HTML Canvas promised but never delivered the tooling to replace it and it’s had enough time.

Debugging with print statements is underrated.

I really like ASP.Net. I don't know If it's still used much but I still use it for voluntary web work. I love SQL Server too.

As a rust thot OCaml seems cool to me

Python!

Apps Hungarian. I know, it's dead, but terse self-naming identifiers were an incredible step forward.

Not sure how to frame it properly, but I think each iteration of source code control software is worse than the last.

Markdown.
It's my go-to-technology for writing documentation and taking notes (obsidian).

Assembler. I've done things you can't even imagine.

Hey hear me out before your eyes glaze over, I realise saying one of the most popular programming languages in the world doesn't strictly fit definition.. but I'm gonna say JavaScript, specifically ES6 & 8 were real triumphs for improving the language. JS is still gonna JS but.. remember how bad it-

I'd cast my vote for CLIPS. Ever find yourself screaming into the void for help and coming up empty? That's CLIPS for you. It's like being in an elite club where the entry fee is your sanity. But, oh, the power of expert systems you wield once inside.

https://clipsrules.net/

I started a new project in Django recently, and I find the development experience really pleasant

Natural language

dwarf fortress

If you know me at all I'm gonna say Bluetooth. There's so much cool shit that could be done with it but no one is doing it.

If you want me to pick something else - mailing lists. email is the old rss. rss is dead, long live the inbox.

sed & awk -- strong apart, unstoppable together.

Haxe is a really neat language and it's a crying shame that its tooling is so rough

I went to, and then became a counselor at a computer/circus summer camp (yeah, I know) in the 80s & early 90s, & feel like HyperCard never gets its credit as the grandfather to HTML & the fuctional internet.

Groovy.

Ok, not really. But just throwing it out there because I doubt anybody else will mention it, lol.

R for data manipulation. People often think its a clunky stats language - but modern R with dplyr, purrrr and piping (%>%, |>) makes really elegant code (python Pandas is still catching up).

regex are good actually

Elixir and the Erlang ecosystem.

Go. Everyone wants to jump head first into the vomit of punctuation that is the Rust programming language, but Go is well equipped to solve most problems that folks use code to solve. I’d also say that Go is a large part of the reason other languages adopted code formatters.

Since no one else has been brave enough to say it, R.

My favorite underrated technology is the computer. I think people really need to realize how much you can do with a computer. #computers

SQL!

For decades I've seen new tools and methods come along that are supposed to be SQL killers, and it gets no love and is often shat on by CS folks, but SQL skills are still super valuable in any industry/organization.

ruby

HTML. UI frameworks are so ubiquitous, newly hatched devs have no idea what plain vanilla markup is capable of. #software

Another mainframer here, but this time Natural (similar to COBOL). For sure doesn’t have a lot of nice modern features (it’s not object-oriented and the backend is non-relational). But the sheer processing power and speed is unparalleled. It’s why orgs (mostly government) find it difficult to leave.

Perl

I'd like to see Zig get more attention.

Adobe Flash, followed by Visual Basic.

It used to be much easier for eager amateurs to make something that delighted others, or scratched an itch.

Obviously these tools had crippling flaws, but by killing them, it feels like we’ve knocked several rungs off the bottom of the ladder.

A couple that were underrated: TCL and REXX. Both are great languages for string handling.

Haskell is both the most underrated and most overrated of languages.

It allows you to create both greater beauty and greater horrors than any other language I’ve encountered. It is a language of extremes. I will never give it up.

Erlang/Elixir. Erlang was several decades ahead of its time when it was created and the platform is still arguably simpler for many common distributed computing tasks than, say, a patchwork of queues, gRPC, and Kubernetes.

I don't know how these things are rated, but all were created at some point in response to a need and so each has a value in that regard. My only concern nowadays is maintainability and clarity. Also: I *love* comments in code because they can save me hours, and I will never stop fighting for them.

Supercollider isn't so much underrated as unknown/specific, but it's so simultaneously powerful and so unintuitive that getting anything done with it makes me feel like a god

Ada.

I'm biased because we're written entirely in it, but Perl doesn't get enough credit for how powerful it is at anything having to do with text

GNU autotools

awk is pretty much perfect for a lot of line-oriented data processing, and if you use jq to massage things a bit it can process data that was originally in JSON pretty well.

C, specifically unsafe, lemme fuck directly with this memory like a beast C. I wouldn’t write anything exposed to the internet this way, but learning the old-school stuff taught me more about how computers work than anything else.

UTF-8. Often taken for granted

In terms of languages, YAML gets way too much shit. It’s a great solution to a real problem. (Plus, admittedly, some baggage.)

Probably less relevant now that everyone uses high-level languages, but sorted contiguous arrays are the most-underused data structures in computing.

Static web sites.

programming in Hebrew

Based on some of the replies here, Rust!

Objective-C. It was a much much better way of integrating object semantics and zero cost bridging to C api than anything we have today.

#software

CSS. It's very rarely used to its full capacity. If your CSS is more than a page, it can be refactored down to practically nothing. But it takes a lot of work in the code.

Ph$p

C #

From the comments, it looks like I should learn SQL next lol

lua. One of the cleverest small language ideas. Also Wren, kinda sweet.

TurboPascal should make a comeback, it was the first compiled language I learned and ... That is really it's only selling point unfortunately.

Erlang and CSS have been mentioned, so I'll go with purescript. Besides it's capabilities, I'd also argue it is more beginner-friendly since there's often one way to do something, unlike Haskell.

If it's not COBOL it's FORTRAN

How about which one is the most overrated? #software

COBOL

Weren’t you just in meetings about this? It’s Friday!

Rust. Fast and secure, once you get past the learning curve.

Forth and every stack-based esolang it’s inspired

Erlang

I don't know about usefulness, but LISP really is kind of elegant.

Coming from a sysadmin background and having to do a lot with Windows and Azure AD, Powershell. It’s not hiring to be the fastest, but boy is it easy to work with.

I will be really interested in this as a mechanical engineer so that i can learn more

Honestly? Java.

I know, I know, it has the world's biggest corporate hype machine behind it, but I mean just plain java, no frameworks. In the hands of an expert like Bob Lee it was both elegant and blazing fast.

Damn, now I'm sad. RIP, crazybob.

Every time i use SignalR it still feels a little bit like magic. It shouldn’t be this simple to do.

AppleScript forever baby!

SQL is really nice when it's used for it's purpose but lots of demands push it outside it's original scope

Lisp for sure. It's so… beautiful, it fixes so much of what I hate about programming. It feels so wrong that Lisp still hasn't had its day, even now that AI is finally the hot thing in tech again. (Maybe lack of Lisp is why AI's gone so screwy lately—we have angered the Lisp gods by spurning them!)

VHDL and/or Verilog. Being able to code hardware into existence is like having a superpower. Great for recreating arcade experiences from the past and so much more http://8bitworkshop.com/blog/release/2018/12/15/verilog-programming.html

Underrated lang: Lua. Lots of elegance packed into a small set of primitives that many things can be built on. Small footprint. Easy to bind to C etc.

perl

no one wants to actually write (or read lol) perl sure but imo if modern tech stacks had more perl energy in their design people would get a lot fewer headaches.

I’ll be rocking Bourne shell til the day I die

Nowadays I’d say lisp

How about Fortran? It is the main language used in supercomputing

Up and coming: https://dagger.io

As a mathematician I only ever really understood functional programming, so I like how the Lambda Calculus is designed to be done on paper without electricity.

FORTRAN was the most impressive syntax, ever. Change my mind.

I'll chip in and say Turbo Pascal. It taught that good structure in programming was important.

Circa very early 90s, the Borland/Turbo Pascal v6+ environment. OOP primitives, absurdly easy to mingle x86 assembly among your Pascal code, and that amazingly fast compiler.

But then I upgraded to a 386 and could suddenly run Linux… never looked back.

Not at all an unknown dark horse, but C# has amazing power, reliability, and ease of use. It's getting to the point that you can use it anywhere, and it has had a huge leap in performance.
Yet it seems like people avoid it and choose more cumbersome solutions.

Application programming languages -- by which, I mean languages with built-in memory management, bounds checking, overflow checking, exception handling, and a *rich* run-time library -- are da bom, except they don't explode.

I'd always encountered strong objection from C programmers over this.

Whatever technology that allows me to hang out without reading about software engineering.

If I say Rust I'll be beaten to death so instead I'll say Ordered Key-Value Stores. I don't want a SQL interpreter and optimizer between my compiled code and my data.

(Shitpost answer) PostScript, for having the largest conceivable vulnerability surface by being a turing complete langauge.
(Real answer) RegEx. As a solution for 90% of pattern matching, editing, etc tasks, it obviates the need to rewrite frameworks. People should appreciate RegEx more.

Erlang’s good tech ❤️

I'm a scientist, and IDL (Interactive Data Language) is old and closed source, but even after transitioning to Python about 5 years ago I can still make things happen in IDL very quickly, almost w/my eyes closed, without looking anything up. I won't go back but I miss the simplicity.

In honor of the recent passing of Nicklaus Wirth, Pascal. It's what I learned on back in the 90s and laid a solid foundation for understanding all of computer science going forward.

Lua. Love working with it

Regular expressions. Steep learning curve to really understand all the concepts, but once you’re there it’s a technology that opens many doors.

JavaScript might be the most overrated and underrated in the same time

CLU

at a low level: vtables, trampolines, and aslr. rust’s borrow tracking. c++ sfinae and its use in template metaprogramming.

at higher levels: pubsub. non-transformer neural networks.

at the process level: asan/tsan. mercurial, which should have replaced git decades ago.

Visual Basic haha

No love for LISP here yet, I see.

Microsoft excel

SQL

IMHO Haskell.

Modern Unix, like freebsd. Open source idolizes linux, and Unix languishes.

Bluesky is my refuge from such discussion 😎

I'm a Julia guy so I'm definitely going to say Julia. It's come a massive way and it's a great general purpose language with first class functional support, a wonderful type system, high performance, and a delightful parallelism paradigm.

I think SQL is used a lot in projects where graph DBs or document DBs would be more appropriate just because of habits.

XML

It's like a JSON from the future!

Grass.

MATLAB. I’m still a sucker for the fact that it would let me initialize a matrix of size N, but then I could assign rank N+1.

I guess plain C is still unbeaten in number of ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

R is weird but cool

Tcl

COBOL

ReScript!

It's a JS like syntax for an ML family language. Strong and sound types, variant types, and pattern matching. It blows TypeScript out of the water.

https://rescript-lang.org/

PHP

Here we have the evidence. Every language mentioned that gets a lot of discussion is clearly appreciated and therefore rated or overrated. See the one that get little or no response. These are clearly the most underrated.

Forth.

I see many interesting answers but I'm gonna say something different.

I liked D that was a kind of higher level C, and I use Groovy quite a lot.

This right here

it's probably CLU, Modula-3, or Postscript

CLU had a lot of things first, as did Modula-3, and modern languages like Go are only recently catching up to their feature set

postscript might also seem in the past but lives on in pdf and html canvas primitives

If you've ever programmed on an old TI-8X graphing calculator, whatever that language is would be my answer. I was able to program card games and a racing game on my TI-82.

I still get a little sad when I remember that the batteries leaked and destroyed all my work.

Cplus

SwiftUI