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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#131

Post by codingdave »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #96

Very surprised that ColdFusion isn't on this list. Say what you want about it, but remember this... You know how all you React, VueJS and frontend developers just LOOOOOVE components... Yeah... ColdFusion had that first in what was called "Custom Tags". Heck... It had alot of features that you find today in almost every other language, but it is dying a SLOOOOOOOOW death.

You are correct that ColdFusion pioneered some modern features, but the author had a specific definition of influence, and states: "Before we start, a quick primer on finding influence. Just knowing that X was the first language with feature Z doesn’t mean that X actually influenced Z.", and then goes on to state that influence only counts if it exists in citations of papers or documentation.

You can absolutely go to town arguing whether or not their definition of influence makes sense, though.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#133

Post by spdegabrielle »

_asummers wrote: post #105
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…

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.

The reputation of the school is a proxy. Teachers are the ones doing the teaching. I think you got lucky!

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#134

Post by cwzwarich »

j-pb wrote: post #10
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…

Self has an even bigger legacy, the JVM is basically all the technology that made Self fast ported over to Java. David Ungar pioneered not only Self and prototype based inheritance, but also generational garbage collection, and polymorphic inline caching. Before Sun cannibalised the Self team into Java, it was actually slow as a snail. Another fun fact, a reduced version of Self was used the programming language for…

> Self has an even bigger legacy, the JVM is basically all the technology that made Self fast ported over to Java.

Java only became fast after the HotSpot server compiler, which was written by Cliff Click (and Micahael Paleczny / Christopher Vick) and takes a different approach than Smalltalk / Self compilers.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#135

Post by kick »

gwbas1c wrote: post #123
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.

Wait, Pascal was in use in 2010? I thought it was a dead language when I used it in high school in 1997-1998.

Pascal has been in an incredibly strange state of being both dead and alive simultaneously for the past thirty years.

...but yeah, it was definitely doing pretty good throughout the 1990s.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#136

Post by padseeker »

No one is doing anything new in COBOL but there is so much old stuff that could only be replaced by a massive investment in rebuilding infrastructure. COBOL isn't dying anytime soon.

At one point, like 10-15 years ago, I knew experienced well paid COBOL programmers being laid off and being replaced by kids fresh out of school. And then CS programs, if not outright stopped, at least greatly reduced teaching COBOL courses. And no one coming out of school learning Java and Python and Node wants to write COBOL.

And then old timer COBOL programmers started retiring, but companies (especially banks) were not replacing their existing mainframe infrastructure. So now you have a gap between supply (COBOL programmers) and demand ( mostly banks), to the point that retired programmers are doing part time work for $200 an hour. Here's an article from 4 years ago;

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-banks-cobol/banks-scr...

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#137

Post by restalis »

azhenley wrote: post #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.

I'm still trying to reconcile "most influential" with "nobody's ever heard of". It may be that CLU implemented in premiere some concepts, but if later those concepts may as well just have been rediscovered (like the iterator design pattern) as the obvious thing to do, then what that leaves us?

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#138

Post by jonahx »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #59
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

What were the specific impacts awk had on Self?

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#139

Post by ansible »

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…

Cost was likely an issue for Eiffel adoption in the 1990's.

There were a couple commercial implementations, with ISE being the dominant player. I bought a copy, but it wasn't cheap.

The open source SmallEiffel (later SmartEiffel) compiler by Dominique Colnet (and others) from loria.fr [1] didn't implement implement some parts of the language until the late 1990's.

It never had a big community.

[1] http://smarteiffel.loria.fr/

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#140

Post by ryl00 »

tyingq wrote: post #127
goto11 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> derefs of complex data structures

Am I the only one who finds perl data structures simple and consistent? Once I understood the difference between () and [] (or {} for hashes), it was easy (too easy, some might say!) to construct complex data structures.

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