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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#161

Post by CalChris »

thequux wrote: post #19
j-pb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ungar's thesis is one of the most magnificent tours de force it's ever been my pleasure to read. It's mostly a series of "Here's why this technique is impossible to implement efficiently, but never mind that; here's how we implemented it efficiently anyway."

Yeah, it was very readable. It implemented the SOAR processor, Smalltalk On A RISC, which is credited by the Berkeley crowd as the RISC-III.

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1986/CSD-86-287...

However, I don't think SPARC would be saddled with tagged integers were it not for SOAR.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#162

Post by therealcamino »

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.

That's an interesting question. I was going to guess CLU, but I was very wrong: there are native VAX and SPARC implementations, a Portable CLU implementation, and even a CLU-to-C compiler. Impressive for a language I hadn't heard of before today!

http://www.pmg.lcs.mit.edu/CLU.html

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#163

Post by WorldMaker »

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.

It depends somewhat on when you tried to learn prototypes in JS. The time before Firefox implementation detail `__proto__` leaked into general web platform usage had some rough spots, as the big obvious example to mind. It still took almost too long after that before `Object.getPrototypeOf()` and `Object.setPrototypeOf()` were standardized. Admittedly "the prototype of this instance" shouldn't always be accessed and/or manipulated directly in "proper" prototype-oriented code, but there are a lot of practical cases that show up where it ends up being useful.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#164

Post by jeltz »

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.

CPAN is probably the biggest influence, it is the ancestor of most package managers used today. But Perl has also spread its dialect of regular expression and the idea of regular expression literals, plus it was hugely influential on Ruby which then have lived on in Elixir and Crystal.

Also you may be correct about it kicking off the scripting languages' popularity, and as someone else mentioned it is also responsible for cgibin.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#165

Post by gen220 »

ORioN63 wrote: post #81
gtk40 wrote: post #78

I'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…

My story is similar to the OP's. Started with TI-BASIC, and downgraded to Java for a programming class. :)

It turns out, you can actually write programs in TI-BASIC on a computer, and sync the file to the calculator with the usb connector.

I used to charge kids in my class for copies of my games (Snake, and a Zork-esque text adventure). a lot of early business lessons there, in retrospect.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#167

Post by WorldMaker »

tyingq wrote: post #143
ryl00 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Plus many years of Bash script intended one-liners to replace or augment awk/sed leading a lot of Perl Golfers to a sublanguage that makes APL look far saner in comparison. That the code golf then shows up in "production scripts" and libraries (if for no other reason than muscle memory) builds a fortress wall to readability by outsiders.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#168

Post by jeltz »

jhbadger wrote: post #68
bhaak wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this several times. You need to get the stuff to the students who usually have no money to spare. Emphasis on "NO". Affordable doesn't cut it. If you can't download it from somewhere for free, something else will be used by students that will later determine what they'll use at their startups or companies. Even better if it's legal to download for free.

I'm not denying that the modern world of open source tooling and online documentation is better, but in the 1980s-early-1990s that's just not how it was. Things like Turbo Pascal and Smalltalk/V cost money, but not that much, and were worth it because of the large printed manuals they included, which were needed because you couldn't just Google things.

Yes, which does not contradict his original point. Java arrived in the mid 90s, and unlike many of its competitors you could just download Java and use it for free which gave Java a competitive advantage. Universities had good Internet connections at that point.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#169

Post by dleslie »

pjmlp wrote: post #159
dleslie wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kotlin, Swift and Javascript are in plenty of mobile games. There are loads of HTML5 games on Steam. There are Switch games written in Ruby.

I get the impression you're an outsider looking in, relying on decades out of date personal experience to understand what they see.

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