Live data from Hacker News

Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

101–110 of 291 posts

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#101
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there active languages influenced by E? I came across that erights site years ago, and I always meant to learn more about it.

the concept of promises as used in JavaScript comes from E

Aren't they originally from Scheme? I remember seeing a Scheme implementation years ago.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#102
post #4

Interesting 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.

In Lithuania and perhaps in similar countries Pascal is still main programming language in classrooms. Also no other language has beaten Pascal in number of released books so it will stay for very long time.

I almost started a new retrocomputing-related project in pascal recently because FreePascal seems to be the only stable maintained toolchain that still can target 8086

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#103
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there active languages influenced by E? I came across that erights site years ago, and I always meant to learn more about it.

the concept of promises as used in JavaScript comes from E

Promises for async results has been around for decades and E got the idea from Joule.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#104
post #54
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I agree that Perl influenced Ruby which I guess in turn influenced CoffeeScript and Elixir to some degree, the lineage of PHP seems to be dead. I don't really know any languages that are inspired by PHP itself, other than maybe Hack which one could argue is very closely related to PHP.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#105
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…

That's interesting that the curriculum didn't teach it! I went to a not terrific school and we learned about Self in undergrad P/L theory.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#106
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/

Perl consultants and distributors know that Perl is still widely used duct tape in the industry, and has even seen a slight upturn in popularity recently (although perhaps not as much as some other languages), when a new generation of developers has discovered how useful it can be. It's just not something one talks about.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#107
> CLU might be the most influential language that nobody’s ever heard of. Iterators? CLU. Abstract data types? CLU. Generics? CLU. Checked exceptions? CLU.

Well, I learned something new and I spend a lot of time reading about PL (and even teach undergrad PL!). Had never heard of CLU before.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#108
post #4

Interesting 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.

I still write almost all my code in Pascal

It compiles very fast to native code, has properties with implicit setters/getters, null-safe strings with mutability xor aliasing, function and operator overloading.

It is really amazing

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#109
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.)

There are probably >100,000 c++ devs out there, and ~100 of them work on HotSpot. I don't think the HotSpot devs are significant in encouraging c++ usage

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#110
post #15

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…

Ada was also very expensive up until relatively recently, so there could very well be something to what you're saying.
Post reply on HN