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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#171

Post by WorldMaker »

pjdemers wrote: post #147

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.

At least one simplified view of the death of Pascal is the rise and fall of Borland. Borland's compilers were the fastest. Borland invested more in FFI work and C-interop than competitors. Eventually Pascal was Borland (and vice versa), because no commercial entity (in the 90s-ish) was using a non-Borland Pascal compiler. Borland making bad business decisions and Microsoft making good business decisions in poaching key Borland staff at the right moments, seems like some obvious death nails in Pascal's coffin. (Obviously that's still a very simplified narrative to history, but it is an easy and common one.)

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#172

Post by Scarbutt »

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…

I'm surprised Clojure isn't in the list either.

Edit: To clarify, Clojure is mostly a dead language that didn't have any innovations by itself, but it did influenced many programmers(the creator is good at marketing). It helped push forward the FP mindset into the users of other mainstream languages(js, python, java).

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#173

Post by jeltz »

Someone wrote: post #66
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#.

And that wasn’t because it had better C interop?

No, while C interop was useful it was mostly because it was easier to write low latency code in C++.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#174

Post by empath75 »

7thaccount wrote: post #62

The APL section seems a little off. I downloaded the latest Dyalog version and the RIDE IDE and it was all very simple to use. Despite having zero APL experience I wrote a pretty nifty program to simulate something in my domain in like 3 lines of code. The keyboard thing is a non-issue as the IDE let's you enter symbols and you quickly start to memorize that you can enter command-key r to enter rho and so forth. I've…

I feel like APL would almost be better as a handwritten language.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#176

Post by WorldMaker »

mlochbaum wrote: post #76
7thaccount wrote: post #62

The APL section seems a little off. I downloaded the latest Dyalog version and the RIDE IDE and it was all very simple to use. Despite having zero APL experience I wrote a pretty nifty program to simulate something in my domain in like 3 lines of code. The keyboard thing is a non-issue as the IDE let's you enter symbols and you quickly start to memorize that you can enter command-key r to enter rho and so forth. I've…

I think it's fair to say that font issues were a significant reason for its decline in the late 80s and 90s (well before good unicode support). Other major factors were spreadsheets, which did many of the things APL was best at with an intuitive graphical interface, and OOP. APL didn't have OOP, so it was for dinosaurs. Structured programming could have had the same effect—mainstream APLs picked up ifs and while loop…

It's an interesting wonder if now that Unicode is much more ubiquitous, and people grow used to (and fond of) complex IMEs such as "emoji keyboards" and intricate ligatures of digraphs and trigraphs (fonts like Fira Code, Cascadia Code), if there will be an interesting APL resurgence or perhaps a modern Unicode "native" successor.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#177

Post by 7thaccount »

empath75 wrote: post #174
7thaccount wrote: post #62

The APL section seems a little off. I downloaded the latest Dyalog version and the RIDE IDE and it was all very simple to use. Despite having zero APL experience I wrote a pretty nifty program to simulate something in my domain in like 3 lines of code. The keyboard thing is a non-issue as the IDE let's you enter symbols and you quickly start to memorize that you can enter command-key r to enter rho and so forth. I've…

I feel like APL would almost be better as a handwritten language.

So it was originally designed by a Harvard Math professor (Kenneth Iverson) as just that. A new mathematical notation to write down. He didn't get tenure (although later got the Turing award for some of that work) so he went to IBM and they actually implemented it. Aaron Hsu has done some blog posts on how he sometimes code using a nice calligraphic pen and paper with APL.

https://www.sacrideo.us/paper-is-dead-long-live-paper-progra...

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#178

Post by jacobush »

evgen wrote: post #12
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…

Having played with Self a bit before the Newton came out and then seeing it in NewtonScript, it was a very cool thing to watch the idea of system-wide prototype-based inheritance filter through the community. I think it was a bit too much for most people to grok, but the ability of a coder to modify only a few prototypes in the system soup to change the behavior of existing apps was absolutely amazing.

Something similar in thought (but less generic), was the concept of "datatypes" in AmigaOS. It meant software could seamlessly import and export data in formats even though it had no knowledge of its internal representation.

A word processor could include for instance PNG images even though PNG was not even invented when the word processor was created!

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#179

Post by jacobush »

Scarbutt wrote: post #172
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…

I'm surprised Clojure isn't in the list either. Edit: To clarify, Clojure is mostly a dead language that didn't have any innovations by itself, but it did influenced many programmers(the creator is good at marketing). It helped push forward the FP mindset into the users of other mainstream languages(js, python, java).

Isn't Clojure a relative newcomer for it to influence language design in general?

A stepping stone to more mainstream languages perhaps? I hardly saw a Clojure program so please elaborate.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#180

Post by bonzini »

cwzwarich wrote: post #134
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…

> 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.

Can you explain the differences?
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