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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#41

Post by davedx »

pjmlp wrote: post #38
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…

I don't think it's a very bad example at all, it's just not the only reason C++ "didn't die out".

I worked as a C++ programmer from something like 2001 - 2010, and all video games companies used it. I wouldn't have learned how to program properly in it without the games experience I gained.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#42

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Those rewrites don't get much uptake in many enterprises, most are more open to just rewrite a couple of modules into native libraries and call them from Java, than throwing away the whole eco-system and respective tooling.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#43

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Java has it since ages.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#45

Post by pjmlp »

avian wrote: post #37
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 arg…

Urban legend, as Borland fanboy, using their Pascal and C++ products, the generated binaries were pretty much the same, even if you might had to play with compiler pragmas, like disabling bounds checking for example.

In MS-DOS days, if you actually cared about performance, a macro Assembler was the only way to achieve it.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#46

Post by pansa2 »

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.

`_` digit separators are also supported by both Python and Go.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#47

Post by pjmlp »

davedx wrote: post #41
pjmlp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think it's a very bad example at all, it's just not the only reason C++ "didn't die out". I worked as a C++ programmer from something like 2001 - 2010, and all video games companies used it. I wouldn't have learned how to program properly in it without the games experience I gained.

My introduction to C++, was Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS, in 1992.

Until 2001, you had Mac OS, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, EPOC, Telligent, ill fated Coplad, SOM, COM, CORBA, Newton all using C++ as the main programming language for enterprise applications.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#48

Post by jhbadger »

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…

But there was an affordable Smalltalk system in the early 1990s -- Digitalk's Smalltalk/V. It cost $99 and came with a huge manual that had a great tutorial. It introduced me (and lots of others) to the whole idea of object-orientation.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#49

Post by PopeDotNinja »

tyingq wrote: post #25

Expecting to see Perl in an article like this in 5 to 10 years. Wasn't the first language I learned, but there's a fond place in my heart for it. At the time, it was the (only) less painful way to get at sockets, libc calls like getpwnam(), etc. I know the TIOBE index is flawed, but...ouch: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/

And maybe Ruby in another 10 to 20?

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#50

Post by skissane »

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#.

Why did C++ survive the advent of Java? One reason: the mainstream JVM, HotSpot, is written in C++. As such, the production Java ecosystem is not self-hosting and relies on C++ to be sustained.

(Writing a JVM in just Java is doable, and some research JVMs have done it, but that approach hasn’t yet been fully productionised.)

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