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There 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.
Another 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…
(ducks for cover)
I know someone writing Smalltalk on a daily basis for this system: https://kyma.symbolicsound.com/
I 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.
Great 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 i…
With the high prices of Smalltalk and Objective-C environments, Java attracted a lot of companies and developers who wanted an object-oriented programming language that provided some of Smalltalk's benefits (e.g., garbage collection, memory safety, a rich standard library) without having to shell out the cash for a Smalltalk implementation.
I 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.
As cool as E was, it was almost entirely based on core ideas lifted from Joule and KeyKOS. I can't really see any influence beyond a "wouldn't it be great if language X had feature Y like you find in E".
There 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.
Lisp? (ducks for cover) I know someone writing Smalltalk on a daily basis for this system: https://kyma.symbolicsound.com/
If we're only talking about influential languages, I'd agree with you and put lisp on the top.
Another 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…
Something I always wonder about COBOL, since it has so little influence on other languages, is if there are good ideas that we missed out on.