I wonder which of these languages are completely inaccessible today? As in you can’t run them on any modern machine or even find an emulator for them.
I would love some online tutorials/sandboxes for exploring these historical languages.
Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
121–130 of 291 posts
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#122> 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...
"It's hard to believe how fast things changed and desktop apps were replaced by web apps.."
Mostly business type front ends and it actually mostly makes sense for that purpose. But there are huge areas where browsers play no role.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#123Interesting 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.
Wait, Pascal was in use in 2010? I thought it was a dead language when I used it in high school in 1997-1998.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#124I'm a younger millennial (born in early 90s) who got his start with BASIC. The first programming I did was on Q-BASIC on our aging desktop machine (386 with Windows 3.1) that we didn't use for much, especially with very limited Internet use. When I took programming in high school, we started with TI-BASIC on TI-83 calculators for about a month, as my programming teacher felt like this best replicated his experience l…
I started to learn programming, by writing programs in TI-BASIC on the TI-84 (compatible with the 83) calculator. I just got it, because it was required to have a graphic calculator for math class. It was just enough of a push. Small programs and games were fine and I actually got really used to the keyboard (I can still type on it pretty quickly these days). For longer programs I def. remember wanting to program wit…
Same. My TI-BASIC magnum opus was 527 lines of spaghetti code, implementing dozens of nested menus for solving any trigonometry problem I was assigned. I honestly think that this is one of the best ways to introduce programming to a kid: "Hey, that math homework looks pretty tedious...wouldn't it be nice if your calculator could do all the work for you?"
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#125Both ML and Smalltalk are definitely not dead, not even mostly dead, they’ve just evolved into language families whose members have different names. The ML family has Standard ML, OCaml, and Haskell, and the Smalltalk family has Pharo, GemStone, GNU Smalltalk, and others. These all may not have hugely wide adoption, but they are actively used in both academia and industry, and continue to grow and evolve, and their continued evolution is still influencing other languages.
Ok, you can argue about the definition of "mostly dead", but whatever you decide these two just aren't in the same category as the others on this list.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#126Both ML and Smalltalk are definitely not dead, not even mostly dead, they’ve just evolved into language families whose members have different names. The ML family has Standard ML, OCaml, and Haskell, and the Smalltalk family has Pharo, GemStone, GNU Smalltalk, and others. These all may not have hugely wide adoption, but they are actively used in both academia and industry, and continue to grow and evolve, and their c…
Haskell isn't in the ML family. It is a descendant of Miranda and some other lazy functional languages.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not sure I understand that one. I know Larry Wall is a linguist. But there's not much about Perl, to me, that seems like a human language.
If I dig into the gripes about the syntax, it's usually use of the implied $_ variable, wide use of sigils ($, @, %), derefs of complex data structures (hash of lists of hashes, etc) or regex syntax that people are talking about.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#128Both ML and Smalltalk are definitely not dead, not even mostly dead, they’ve just evolved into language families whose members have different names. The ML family has Standard ML, OCaml, and Haskell, and the Smalltalk family has Pharo, GemStone, GNU Smalltalk, and others. These all may not have hugely wide adoption, but they are actively used in both academia and industry, and continue to grow and evolve, and their c…
Haskell isn't in the ML family. It is a descendant of Miranda and some other lazy functional languages.
Granted. 8-)
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#129Expecting 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 is possibly the clearest example of the "Osborne effect": announcing Perl6 took focus off Perl5, but it took far too long to arrive. So by the time it did many of the community had drifted away and the core use cases were becoming less relevant. Python almost did this to itself with the 2to3 transition.
An important difference is that Python 3.0 arrived soon, while it took ages for a complete Perl 6 release to be available. That is, if you didn't want to learn or use Python 2.x because it was soon going to be obsolete, you already had a working alternative; but if you didn't want to learn or use Perl 5.x because it was soon going to be obsolete, for a significant amount of time Perl 6 wasn't an option.
Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
#130I'm surprised by how hard this article is on Algol 68. It was pretty influential: - Influenced C's type system. I'm just going to quote Dennis Ritchie on this: "The scheme of type composition adopted by C owes considerable debt to Algol 68, although it did not, perhaps, emerge in a form that Algol's adherents would approve of. The central notion I captured from Algol was a type structure based on atomic types (includ…
That ALGOL-68 was hated by almost everyone who like previous ALGOL versions is not to be discounted.
ALGOL-68 was loved by people who would have never used ALGOL to begin with (and they didn't start doing so with ALGOL-68).
It was difficult to write compilers for, slow & far too complex.