There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as Real Programmer , and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see " The Story of Mel in Appendix A). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal } and Ada , which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language , and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and unmitigated loss