1y ago

What programming languages exist in the Star Trek Universe?

62 comments

Star Trek Discovery seems to refer to C header files:

Perhaps more worrying, these are Windows API calls. The USS Discovery runs on Windows.
- If I didn't have reason to reject discovery before, now i really do.
- There was a reference in Discovery season one or two to SQL, as if it was cool. Sigh.
  
  @StillPaisleyCat @skullgiver
  From an old trek book, the hardware is canonically IBM. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/StarTrekTheNextGeneration:20thCenturyComputersandHowTheyWorked

Lisp. All is Lisp.
Data's entire consciousness was written as an Emacs package.
Klingons program in Brainfuck. A Warrior's Language!
Vulcans exclusively use APL.
The F in Ferengi stands for Fortran.
Python is banned across the known galaxy. If your race is discovered using it, your planet is immediately bombarded until the entire crust is molten.
Cardassians use Haskell because they're evil.
- You missed out Q Basic.
  
  Holy shit you win, lol
  
  That's what the Pakled use. The best of them actually use QuickBasic to "make it go faster".
- The F in Ferengi stands for Fortran.
  If Ferengi were to use a language that old, you'd think it would be the COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
- Just to add - obviously all Ferengi programs run on a Blockchain, and are riddled with microtransactions.
- I'll just add that Data was previously built as a Vi plugin, but it was evil, so Doctor Soong disassembled it and shut it down. A lot of trouble could have been saved it Dr Soong had learned how to actually exit Vi.
  
  Evil as in emacs evil-mode?
- Pakleds use scratch
  
  PHP was invented by a Pakled
  
  Are you sure? They might have learned something then. Or did they get stuck with a turtle-logic compiler instead?
- The Q continum uses forth.
- Hahaha, why no python?
  
  The reason has been purged, intentionally forgotten. Vulcans train their entire lives to take on a dangerous task: once every 66 years, the very best of the best view the reason why Python is banned. Once viewed, the Vulcan confirms that it is indeed a just and necessary action to ban the ancient language.
  After the task is complete, the Vulcan goes utterly, irretrievably insane and dies mere hours later.
- No malbolge? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge
- @bloopernova Wouldn't the Vulcans prefer Prolog?
- What about php

C. It is eternal.
- C will be swapped out function by function with Zig.
  
  In such a case, I suspect that Zig will be absorbed by C using a maneuver that I call "The Zig Zag". After all, C is eternal.

Have you seen how people do programming? We see lots of it in Voyager around holograms. It's basically today's AI programming assistants on steroids. everything probably uses some fucking 300 years JavaScript as a basis, and that's why everything keeps breaking all the time.
- I really want to see an episode of Lower Decks where the captain watches engineers write programs, comes to the conclusion that "programming is just talking to the computer -- I can do that" and fires all the engineers (or transfers them to other functions.)
  
  Thanks, I read it in Freeman's voice.
- Yeah they just tell the computer what they want. They're prompt engineers hundreds of years in the future. Programming, replicator, holodeck, lights in the quarters, whatever. Makes you wonder what all the button pushing is on the bridge. Maybe because it's quieter than everyone talking over each other?
- Thank you for plausibly explaining every holodeck episode. That's canon for me now.
- This is simply too good...
- One million lines of BASIC!
  
  Unstructured Basic (with no documentation naturally.)

Binary

Honestly I've always imagined them using a more natural interface just like when they speak to the computer. So when they run commands it's essentially ai driven, and so is what they see on their screens. Why ever touch a piece of code when an ai can manage it for you and offers a natural interface with flexibility. It would simply be inefficient to do it any other way.
- Makes sense, if you have an infallible ai. Bc it’s probably outputting machine code and that wouldn’t be so fun to debug.

C+++

lieutenant commander data structures.

You know it’s JavaScript
- Wow. That would explain why a light tap to the shields causes everyone's interface to explode in their face.

The only example given on Memory Alpha is a decompiled section of StuxNet https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Programming_code so that implies that C and C++ are both still in use
- No, nothing on discovery is real.

Polarity reversal

UFPLisp

Not a language, but isn't there some beta canon somewhere that states that LCARS is a derivative of Linux or something?
- Waiting for an engineer to pull up holo-Torvalds to debate C vs rust the way they pull up holo-Einstein to argue relativity.
  
  Or holo-Leah Brahms to have creepy relationships with.

@ZenkorSoraz To paraphrase a developer from the ‘80s: “I don't know what the language of the future will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.”

If it's the original series, one has to assume that whatever programming is done, is done on a teletype. Nowhere in Star Trek:TOS is there a screen with words on it, because when the show was made... screens with words on them weren't how you got info from a computer.

Rust. Everything is eventually becoming crabs.

Ostensibly Lisp, but most of it is hacked together with perl.

62 comments