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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#181

Post by bonzini »

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).

Clojure is essentially a Lisp.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#182

Post by _0ffh »

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.

Yeah, also the only other language that is as simple at it's core as Forth is Lisp. I suspect that lots of CS people have at some point written their own of either, or both, just for the experience.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#183

Post by devurand »

cesarb wrote: post #129
pjc50 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is possibly the clearest example of the "Osborne effect": announcing Perl6 took focus off Perl5, but it took far too long to arrive. So by the time it did many of the community had drifted away and the core use cases were becoming less relevant. Python almost did this to itself with the 2to3 transition.

An important difference is that Python 3.0 arrived soon, while it took ages for a complete Perl 6 release to be available. That is, if you didn't want to learn or use Python 2.x because it was soon going to be obsolete, you already had a working alternative; but if you didn't want to learn or use Perl 5.x because it was soon going to be obsolete, for a significant amount of time Perl 6 wasn't an option.

> it took ages for a complete Perl 6 release to be available.

And unfortunately, the brilliant minds that worked on Perl 6 spent so much time rewriting the compiler tool chain and basically treating just that part as a research project, that it was incredibly difficult to actually contribute and push the project forward. Couple that with a spec that never seemed finished and a community that tore itself apart because of assholes, and it was a perfect storm to remove Perl from prominence.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#184

Post by WorldMaker »

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?

In this case there's a lot of evidence at least the language designers were paying attention to (Dr.) Barbara Liskov's published academic work over the decades, even if academic papers/languages rarely make it into mainstream consciousness. At a brief glance it looks like an Erdos number game of a sort, in that CLU papers were referenced a lot by other articles, then those articles were referenced by a lot more. There is probably a lot of one or two degree separation.

One specific dot this article helped me connect (thanks article) was that Barbara Liskov of CLU is the same namesake of Liskov's Substitution Principle, which definitely has made broader waves in mainstream OOP consciousness among programmers. It originated in a paper two decades after a lot of the CLU work so it isn't directly a part of CLU's own influence on the world, but it is quite probable that CLU's influence is deep inside the formation/elucidation of the Principle in that Barbara Liskov was clearly thinking about the problem area for decades, and in some cases decades ahead of colleagues and practical applications.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#185

Post by TomMasz »

I did my Master's (1994) work with Smalltalk (specifically Little Smalltalk) and I still play around with Squeak when I have some free time. Not exactly producing production code, obviously, but you can build things for yourself and there's nothing wrong with that.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#186

Post by abetlen »

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.

Weird right? I learned Pascal in highschool in Ontario around 2010 as well. I remember being really frustrated at the time because we weren't learning some modern language like Java or Python. Instead we were stuck with Turbo Pascal, writing in an IDE so old it only supported 8 character long filenames. Thank god we had an amazing teacher which ended up making it one of the best CS classes I've ever taken.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#187

Post by WorldMaker »

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.

ColdFusion had much more limited exposure to the general world than say PHP. Also, arguably and IMNSHO, ColdFusion was quite bad at a lot of its own features. Custom Tags specifically as the given example, were barely more than duct tape over SSI (Server-Side Includes) and never really had a "proper" Component model or DOM for most (if not all, again IMNSHO) of its history.

(CF is a language on my list of hopes to never see again.)

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#188

Post by devurand »

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.

When I started to learn other languages after learning bash then Perl first, I was really dismayed at how clumsy it was to build up a data structure of any complexity. So verbose in the Java/C++/C# land.

Having those constructs so effortlessly available with a minimal amount of syntax spoiled me. To this day, I would likely still prefer to do any kind of complicated ETL involving deeply nested structures with Perl.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#189

Post by atishay811 »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #104
tyingq wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it was pretty influential for Ruby, CGI-BIN, pcre, and other things that will live on in more refined forms. PHP has some obvious Perl influence as well. Edit: Maybe also Perl's Configure (crazy wide cross-platform portability) and CPAN. They were pretty ahead of their time.

While I agree that Perl influenced Ruby which I guess in turn influenced CoffeeScript and Elixir to some degree, the lineage of PHP seems to be dead. I don't really know any languages that are inspired by PHP itself, other than maybe Hack which one could argue is very closely related to PHP.

React(Js framework) is close to PHP as a concept. Facebook's team had to take ideas from their exisitng code. With JSX, we could potentially call it a new language.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#190

Post by pansa2 »

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).

Is Clojure really “mostly dead”?
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