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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#111

Post by gerikson »

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/

Perl was probably culturally influential - scripting glue - but as a language it's almost uniquely eclectic. There are influences from all over, mostly shell and AWK but also from functional languages.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#112

Post by pmcjones »

urxvtcd wrote: post #23

Interesting stuff! Is there a kind of web archive of programming languages? Can we make sure their compilers, interpreters, etc. are not lost? Sure, there are issues of them being proprietary, or needing some virtualization to run; I'm just wondering.

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects Is a start.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#113

Post by alharith »

BostonFern wrote: post #84
SzamarCsacsi wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classes in JavaScript are just syntactic sugar around prototypes.

Ironically, what it really needs is explicit syntax for prototypes.

I don't think it did. Those of us who bothered to spend more than a glancing look at prototypes figured them out pretty easily. Including Classes in JavaScript feel like pandering: there really wasn't much to directly gain from them, but they threw them in there anyways because the TC knew it'd gain JavaScript some popularity.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#114

Post by TurboHaskal »

kqr wrote: post #106
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/

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.

I like Perl a lot, it is the language I have used the most in my professional career. That being said, on my last two workplaces it happened to be in the list of forbidden technologies, not even being able to write a simple one liner and instead having to resort to using awk, sed and the like. It sadly suffers from underserved hate from developers who never used it.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#115

Post by goto11 »

mattkrause wrote: post #93
goto11 wrote: 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 also give it some credit as a cautionary tale. A lot of subsequent languages have focused on readability, partly as a reaction to some of the....unique things came up with in Perl.

Yeah, the idea that programming languages should be more like human languages seemed promising at the time. Perl showed us that we definitely does not want that.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#116

Post by LeonidasXIV »

fanf2 wrote: post #32

The ML section misses out some significant successors: there was a fork between CAML and SML. Ocaml is still widely used, and has its own spawn such as ReasonML and BuckleScript.

Neither ReasonML nor BuckleScript are really OCaml descendants. ReasonML is a different syntax for OCaml, with even closer match than CoffeeScript 1.x had to JS. Compiled ReasonML code cannot be distinguished from code that was written in OCaml. BuckleScript OTOH is a set of forks of older compiler versions which have a JS backend. It works with both Reason and OCaml syntax.

ReasonML therefore is much closer to the revised OCaml syntax (a failed previous alternate syntax) than it is to its own language.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#117

Post by tyingq »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #104
tyingq wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if the lineage dies with PHP, that pulls in Facebook and WordPress.

Smarty could possibly take credit for inspiring some of the template engines out there also.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#119

Post by FpUser »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #89
dionys wrote: 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.

It took me years before I stopped accidentally typing ":=" in my C code.

I switch quite often. Sometimes 3 languages a day: Delphi/Lazarus/FreePascal, C++ and Javascript so it now takes few minutes to adjust.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#120

Post by macintux »

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.

> One is the use of the full stop as an expression terminator, as in English, instead of the semicolon.

That’s something people complain about when looking at Erlang code. Thanks to its Prolog heritage, it uses commas, semi-colons, and full stops to terminate statements.

It’s actually very easy to remember which is which, despite the general angst, because they are directly analogous to those punctuation marks’ usage in English.

Commas indicate a continuation of statements, semi-colons separate clauses within a function, and full stops complete a function definition.

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