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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#31

Post by jerzyt »

ldeangelis wrote: post #8

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…

In the mid 90s I wrote and supported a C++ program for moving around and processing data in a semiconductor factory. It ran on Windows and two different flavors of Unix. Half of my time was spent recompiling/relinking and trying to keep up with the upgrades of the few libraries I've used. When Java came out it was so liberating - I'd write a new version of the software on my laptop and ship an update to a client with HP Unix and it would run without a hitch. I doubt that there's still a lot of use of C++ for entire applications. I suspect it's mostly used in performance critical components.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#33

Post by onychomys »

pjc50 wrote: post #7

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.

If we start using periods to end expressions, would we then have to use semicolons to chain things together? Or would you let the compiler know that foo.size(). was okay and that it shouldn't be waiting around for another function call there?

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#34

Post by lifthrasiir »

onychomys wrote: post #33
pjc50 wrote: post #7

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.

If we start using periods to end expressions, would we then have to use semicolons to chain things together? Or would you let the compiler know that foo.size(). was okay and that it shouldn't be waiting around for another function call there?

Juxtaposition (`foo size()`) is a serious contender I think. In fact, I consider it is one of the most undervalued syntactic choices.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#36

Post by frabert »

dleslie wrote: post #26

> 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. Video Games. From around 1999 to recently, C++ was the language of game development. It only recently came under serious threat, from C#.

I don't really buy into the fact that enterprise apps are written in C++ because gamedev uses it

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#37

Post by avian »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #27

Pascal have two moments which really peak. Turbo pascal and Apple Mac. After that not sure what its use. Ucsd pascal always slow.

Does anyone know whether Turbo Pascal DOS/Windows compiler produced slower code than C compilers at the time? For a long time I was sticking with Pascal and resisted switching to C, even when everyone around me was doing so. One thing I do seem to remember from that time was that the things people were coding up in C seemed to work faster (not sure if it was Borland's Turbo C or something else). It was one of the arguments I remember for leaving Pascal.

Am I misremembering and it was just an urban legend/marketing from C compilers? Thinking back it doesn't seem logical that C would offer any significant performance benefits - both Pascal and C were compiled down to machine code and had approximately the same levels of abstraction.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#38

Post by pjmlp »

dleslie wrote: post #26

> 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. Video Games. From around 1999 to recently, C++ was the language of game development. It only recently came under serious threat, from C#.

Very bad example.

Video games community is very luddite in what concerns adoption of technologies, they usually only move forward when the platform owners force them to do so.

Many moons ago, C, Pascal, Modula-2, Basic were seen as Unity is seen nowadays, naturally real game devs had to use Assembly, specially to take care of the special purpose graphic and sprite engines.

Playstation 1 was probably the first console that force them to start using C instead, while on 16 bit.

So slowly everyone accepted that doing games in C, Pascal and what have wasn't that bad.

C++ only became kind of accepted years later, and even then it was more "C compiled with C++" than anything else.

The major boost for C++ were the OS vendors for home and office computers, Apple, IBM and Microsoft, alongside Zortech, Borland and Watcom, with their full stack C++ frameworks, something that ironically C++ has lost (OS C++ SDKs where it has the front role).

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#39

Post by davedx »

dleslie wrote: post #26

> 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. Video Games. From around 1999 to recently, C++ was the language of game development. It only recently came under serious threat, from C#.

Also Visual C++ and Visual Studio. I worked on desktop software from around 2007-2010, not that long ago; all our software line was built in Visual C++ with MFC.

It's hard to believe how fast things changed and desktop apps were replaced by web apps...

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#40

Post by pjmlp »

linguae wrote: post #15
ldeangelis wrote: post #8

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…

I have another theory about why Java beat other object-oriented programming languages except C++: cost. I can't speak for Eiffel and Ada since I'm unfamiliar with those environments, but in the mid-1990s Java caused a revolution of sorts by providing free-as-in-beer runtimes and development tools that were available for download. I don't know how good GNU G++ was in 1995, but I know that Borland's Turbo C++ and Micro…

I bought Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 (last release before Delphi) for about 150 euros, and Turbo C++ for Windows was about 200 euro, when converted for today's money.

This in 1990 - 1992.

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