Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages • Hacker News Board

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#141

Post by interfixus » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #69

pjmlp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urban legend, as Borland fanboy, using their Pascal and C++ products, the generated binaries were pretty much the same, even if you might had to play with compiler pragmas, like disabling bounds checking for example. In MS-DOS days, if you actually cared about performance, a macro Assembler was the only way to achieve it.

Borland Pascal had built in assembly which was very easy to use and integrated with the rest of the language. This let me have DOS program that had it's own high performance graphics for GUI (I basically stole Motif visual design with some adaptations) and proprietary preemptive multithreading. C programs venturing into same realm were not really any faster and had to use assembly anyways for performance critical par…

Indeed it did, and it was magic. Just an asm: declaration and off you went, kitchen sink and access to variables included. I wrote some fairly nifty graphics stuff that way in the early Delphies, mid to late nineties. Great fun, still miss it.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#142

Post by carapace » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

TurboHaskal wrote: post #114

kqr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

s/underserved/undeserved/ eh? (I don't mean to criticize, I've just been noticing a lot of malapropisms recently. I suspect some auto-correct is goofing up.)

Anyway...

Somewhat deserved, surely?

Perl is like the Continuum transfunctioner, "Its power is exceeded only by its mystery." ;-)

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#143

Post by tyingq » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

ryl00 wrote: post #140

tyingq wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could partially be the TIMTOWTDI thing. People mixing:

$foo->{bar};

$$foo{bar};

And quoting or not the key, etc. Slices and individual elements, etc. Probably looks like line noise to outsiders when you have a long one using parens to grab a specific array element, combined with $$ and so forth.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#144

Post by xkriva11 » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

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…

Moreover, it is much safer to start to learn a new language/environment if you can immediately try it for free and not invest first into an expensive implementation.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#145

Post by Recurecur » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

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…

It is somewhat performance, but there are three other more important factors. (Java performance, not counting startup overhead, is fairly close to C++ now.)

One factor is determinism. GC introduces unpredictable (non-deterministic) time latency, making GC languages generally unsuitable for real time programming.

Another is size efficiency, Java programs have a well-deserved rep for using lots of memory. That isn't a good mix for smaller/embedded systems. Java also carries along a large runtime, although Graal and other efforts are addressing this.

The final factor is that C++ is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be an "improved C". As the heir apparent to C, C++ has a ton of mindshare and momentum. Rust is now providing a major challenge, one I hope it wins! (Honorable mention to D, which is a nice language as well.)

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#146

Post by carapace » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

yiyus wrote: post #77

I'm sorry Forth is not on that list. It could be argued that it was not so influential for mainstream languages, but there is a whole range of concatenative languages that can be considered direct descendants.

I think Forth's influence is more subterranean. I.e. PostScript and coreboot, etc. Forth is there, but rarely in your face.

As far as the underlying concepts, speaking as someone who has experimented recently with Joy (one of the concatenative languages you mention. although it wasn't directly influenced by Forth, I think, it's a case of convergent design), I think it's a shame it hasn't been more influential.

The time may come: check out Conal Elliot's Compiling to Categories.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#147

Post by pjdemers » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

Why I think Pascal is gone for commercial use. Back in the mid-80's I was working on a new project on PCs under DOS. Our first choice language was Pascal. However, sometimes we needed to write at low levels for performance, or to access hardware directly, or call Fortran code. For all of these reasons, we switched to C.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#148

Post by carapace » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

restalis wrote: post #137

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?

> reconcile "most influential" with "nobody's ever heard of"

We ignore the past. I've worked with people who hadn't heard of Alan Kay. I worked with a guy tasked to revamp an expert system who had never heard of Prolog.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#149

Post by dleslie » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

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…

How is it a bad example of something which maintains the popularity of C++ when you acknowledge that C++ has been in use in the time period I mentioned, for that industry?

A few years after the Playstation gained prominence would be around 1999; and shortly thereafter Unreal Engine took the industry by storm.

EASTL is how old, now?

I still remember Carmack's comments of his initial forays into using C++ for idtech.

I don't think it's fair to shrug us off.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#150

Post by Tyr42 » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

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.

I know Turing (which is pascal packed up with a graphics library and manual and editor all in one exe) was in use in Ontario Schools as late as 2010.