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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#51

Post by davedx »

pjmlp wrote: post #47
davedx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The argument is why C++ hasn't died, and the video games industry has undoubtably contributed to its staying power. Most of the things you list have replaced C++ with other languages.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#52

Post by goto11 »

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/

But how how influential was it? It seems most of the unique ideas in Perl have not been adopted by other languages.

But if Perl can be credited with kick starting the dynamic language boom (Python, Ruby) then it have been massively influential.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#53

Post by bhaak »

jhbadger wrote: post #48
linguae wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen this several times. You need to get the stuff to the students who usually have no money to spare.

Emphasis on "NO". Affordable doesn't cut it.

If you can't download it from somewhere for free, something else will be used by students that will later determine what they'll use at their startups or companies.

Even better if it's legal to download for free.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#54

Post by tyingq »

goto11 wrote: post #52
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/

But how how influential was it? It seems most of the unique ideas in Perl have not been adopted by other languages. But if Perl can be credited with kick starting the dynamic language boom (Python, Ruby) then it have been massively influential.

I'd say it was pretty influential for Ruby, CGI-BIN, pcre, and other things that will live on in more refined forms. PHP has some obvious Perl influence as well.

Edit: Maybe also Perl's Configure (crazy wide cross-platform portability) and CPAN. They were pretty ahead of their time.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#55

Post by SzamarCsacsi »

linguae wrote: post #9

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…

Classes in JavaScript are just syntactic sugar around prototypes.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#56

Post by boomlinde »

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…

> 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.

I think this is an unfair assessment. "Real devs" had to use assembly language because when targeting consoles and low-end home computers, this was the only really performant option for a long time. For a lot of types of games this doesn't matter so much, but there's a long ongoing trend in big titles really trying to cram as much visual fidelity as possible into the target machine.

Same deal with C++ today. You can use Unity of course, no one is any less of a "real game dev" because of it, but it's simply not an option if you want to work on cutting edge tech for AAA titles. There are tons of other things you may want to work on, other boundaries to push, which I think is why Unity is such a popular option. But I think it's unfair to simply chalk it up to luddism. Present the available alternatives that compare favorably in terms of development speed and performance for non-critical software instead.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#59

Post by tannhaeuser »

linguae wrote: post #9

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…

This. And while we're at it, we shouldn't discount awk which had a profound impact on Self (and ultimately JavaScript) syntax, in turn. So much so, in fact, that the following pointless code (which doesn't even show JavaScript/awk regexp constants) is both JavaScript and awk:

    function f(x) {
      a[x] = "whatever"
      for (e in a)
        if (a[e] == x)
          return e
    }
Edit: but awk doesn't belong onto the list because it's far from dead
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