201–210 of 291 posts
"almost all of logic programming actually stems from Prolog" Why isn't Prolog on the list then?? :O
is Prolog deader than the logic programming systems stemming from it? The field seems fairly niche overall, but from the limited insight I have Prolog seems to be still around?
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.
And like go, it's loved by people who don't know ALGOLs and hated otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting that the curriculum didn't teach it! I went to a not terrific school and we learned about Self in undergrad P/L theory.
The reputation of the school is a proxy. Teachers are the ones doing the teaching. I think you got lucky!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Perl incorporated regular expressions into a general purpose programming language in a way that seemed fairly unique at the time. Today they seem to be everywhere, often with the help of PCRE-Perl compatible regexps.
It might sound strange to modern eyes but there was an time when Perl was considered elegant and robust, but then again very few young people have ever experienced the horrors of trying to write portable shell code for commercial Unix, perl was on the other hand almost completely identical regardless of what variant of Unix you happened to be running, and vastly faster then sh/awk at a time when even expensive systems could be slow by modern standards.
For modern day script writers Ruby and Python have all but replaced perl even though that's not stopping the enterprise from keeping their perl codebases alive and kicking for the foreseeable future, but even there it's being challenged from bellow by the fact that bash and gawk have become fairly universal on Linux systems and hardware fast enough that regex performance rarely matter.
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.
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…
For instance, you can define a dynamic inheritance : your inheritance can be defined by a function which return an object - so, a prototype - among several.
The author of this language explain me that Self was one of the most important day in his life ;-)
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/
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.
Much of our "duct tape" is unmaintainable code with undocumented aracne regexes everywhere, single-letter variables, and 1990s-era flow control. Nothing you'd find in Modern Perl is in our duct tape. Ultimately, the fastest turnaround on "we need feature X added to Perl script Y" is going to be "rewrite Y in Python, add feature X" because actually extending the Perl code has proven to be a nightmare.
(and as a side note, most of these Perl scripts ran out of cron on various boxen scattered across our network, and as I've been rewriting them I've also been removing them from cron and putting them in our centralized setup that uses Jenkins to run scripts, pulled out of git, inside Docker images on a schedule)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Clojure really “mostly dead”?
It has less market share than perl or delphi (make your own judgement). It was really hyped(rightfully so, a practical lisp for production use? fun! sign me in) then declined fast. Like most(ly dead) languages, it still has its followers, in the case of clojure, mostly a cultish group (my impression from r/clojure and other forums).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.