Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#2Glad to see a mention of CLU; it pioneered a lot of ideas. Reading Joe Duffy's blogs about the Midori project (greenfield language/system design at Microsoft), he mentions CLU as an inspiration a number of times.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#3Glad to see a mention of CLU; it pioneered a lot of ideas. Reading Joe Duffy's blogs about the Midori project (greenfield language/system design at Microsoft), he mentions CLU as an inspiration a number of times.
One can still play with CLU today,
http://www.pmg.lcs.mit.edu/CLU.html
I would already be more than happy if Go 2.0 generics would be CLU like, no need for something more fancy.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#4Interesting to see Pascal on the list - it was the language of choice in my high school and my first programming language, back in 2010. I haven't touched it since, but I do remember it was pretty easy for me to pickup the syntax, especially compared to languages I would learn later in uni, like say C.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#5I linked to something on Erights.org a few days ago http://www.erights.org/
I think E was more influential than its distribution would suggest.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#6Glad to see a mention of CLU; it pioneered a lot of ideas. Reading Joe Duffy's blogs about the Midori project (greenfield language/system design at Microsoft), he mentions CLU as an inspiration a number of times.
Despite having a CS degree I had never heard of CLU, which is a shame. Author is Barbara Liskov of the Liskov Substitution Principle, influential in early OO design.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#7There are a few things present in COBOL that I would like to see lifted into more modern languages. One is the use of the full stop as an expression terminator, as in English, instead of the semicolon. Another is the whole "picture" mechanism for number formats.
More languages should also steal Verilog's use of _ as an optional digit separator. It's just arrived in C# 7.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#8Great article, I love learning more about language influence. I was wondering something:
> Smalltalk wasn’t the only casualty of the “Javapocalypse”: Java also marginalized Eiffel, Ada95, and pretty much everything else in the OOP world. The interesting question isn’t “Why did Smalltalk die”, it’s “Why did C++ survive”. I think it’s because C++ had better C interop so was easier to extend into legacy systems.
Maybe it's linked to performance? Even today some application are rewritten from Java to C++ (or clones are made) to gain performance (like with Cassandra and Scylla).
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#9Another highly influential programming language not listed in the article is Self (http://www.selflanguage.org). Although I've taken two graduate-level courses in programming language theory, I didn't learn about Self until just a few years ago when I was bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp bugs and started reading about the history of these languages and their environments. One of Self's most significant contributions is the idea of prototype-based programming, which is the influence behind JavaScript's traditional lack of classes (though newer versions of JavaScript have support for classes).
I don't know if Self was ever commercialized; I do know that once Java was released Sun focused much of its attention on promoting Java at the exclusion of other object-oriented environments that Sun invested in (such as the OpenStep Objective-C API, which was actually jointly developed by NeXT and Sun). But Self is probably one of the most influential programming languages; it's just a shame that this language was never brought up in any of the computer science courses I've taken.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#10Another highly influential programming language not listed in the article is Self ( http://www.selflanguage.org ). Although I've taken two graduate-level courses in programming language theory, I didn't learn about Self until just a few years ago when I was bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp bugs and started reading about the history of these languages and their environments. One of Self's most significant contribution…
Self has an even bigger legacy, the JVM is basically all the technology that made Self fast ported over to Java.
David Ungar pioneered not only Self and prototype based inheritance, but also generational garbage collection, and polymorphic inline caching.
Before Sun cannibalised the Self team into Java, it was actually slow as a snail.
Another fun fact, a reduced version of Self was used the programming language for most of the Apple Newton, because Dylan was taking too long to get off the Ground.