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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#151

Post by dleslie »

pjmlp wrote: post #74
boomlinde wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think this is an unfair assessment. "Real devs" had to use assembly language because when targeting consoles and low-end home computers, this was the only really performant option for a long time. For a lot of types of games this doesn't matter so much, but…

While it might feel unfair, I wasn't attacking anyone on purpose, it is based on experience, from my demoscene days, to the friends I got to meet in the industry, to my former past as IGDA member, and the ways I have kept in touch with the industry, even though I have decided that the boring corporate world with graphics programming as hobby, was something I rather spend my time on than the typical studio life. While…

I know several studios local to Vancouver that are making heavy use of Go, Swift or Rust. And of course, a few that are deep into HTML5. There are games being shipped written in mruby.

I'm not in agreement with your assessment that the industry is conservative; it is largely responsible for pushing graphics into programmable pipelines, for instance, and the vendor-preffered language lock-in for consoles hasn't really been a factor since the Indie revolution took the industry by storm.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#152

Post by goto11 »

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.

Natural Language Principles in Perl (by Larry Wall): http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#153

Post by eropple »

alharith wrote: post #113
BostonFern wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wha? That's a take.

Here's mine: ES6 classes are wildly smart. They provide the benefits of prototypical inheritance--you can just reach into the thing and do what you want to do!--while making it way easier for many developers to read and parse in short order, while reducing the difficulty spike in moving to JavaScript (or, today, TypeScript).

"Pandering". Right.

I can write old-style object prototypes. It makes my eyes bleed and makes me make more mistakes. So I'm just not gonna do that anymore.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#154

Post by icen »

celeritascelery wrote: post #118

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.

It wouldn't surprise me if all of these languages were alive in some way or other. There are MLs and APLs and Pascals alive and well.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#155

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

goto11 wrote: post #52
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/

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.

>But how how influential was it?

Raku (formerly known as "Perl 6"), PHP, Ruby and PowerShell were directly influenced by Perl.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#156

Post by ThomasBHickey »

kick wrote: post #130
amyjess wrote: post #64

I'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.

Looking back at ALGOL-68, it looks like comparatively small language compared to many of our current languages, e.g. Java, C++ and Python. I loved the definition of it, but never got to use it.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#157

Post by sigzero »

kick wrote: post #135
gwbas1c wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even languages may die."

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#158

Post by InfiniteRand »

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.

It's questionable (although certainly possible) whether ColdFusion's custom tags inspired custom tags in other languages. There were a lot of other elements in the air at the time, such as server side include syntax, that made the idea of incorporating programming logic into markup a logic next step. And then from there it isn't too far to get to custom tags, of course, it's hard to retrospectively estimate the amount of brain effort to leap between concepts, so maybe my assessment is way off, but this is where finding direct documentary links between how technology developed can be helpful.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#159

Post by pjmlp »

dleslie wrote: post #151
pjmlp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it might feel unfair, I wasn't attacking anyone on purpose, it is based on experience, from my demoscene days, to the friends I got to meet in the industry, to my former past as IGDA member, and the ways I have kept in touch with the industry, even though I have decided that the boring corporate world with graphics programming as hobby, was something I rather spend my time on than the typical studio life. While…

I know several studios local to Vancouver that are making heavy use of Go, Swift or Rust. And of course, a few that are deep into HTML5. There are games being shipped written in mruby. I'm not in agreement with your assessment that the industry is conservative; it is largely responsible for pushing graphics into programmable pipelines, for instance, and the vendor-preffered language lock-in for consoles hasn't really…

I don't take indies into consideration on my remark, consoles and mobile OS is where the money is, and none of those languages have a place there currently, with exception of Swift on iOS.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#160

Post by ThomasBHickey »

kqr wrote: post #110
linguae wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always thought that was a major miscalculation by the Ada project. All they thought about was defense contractors and their approach of relying on commercial implementions (priced for those contractors) made it unused in academic environments.
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