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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#211

Post by dionys »

greencore wrote: post #87
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.

In Lithuania and perhaps in similar countries Pascal is still main programming language in classrooms. Also no other language has beaten Pascal in number of released books so it will stay for very long time.

I can confirm! My high school was in Slovakia and I know other people had the same experience with Pascal.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#212

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

icen wrote: post #70
gbrown_ wrote: post #60

> At a time when adding two lists of numbers meant a map or a loop, APL introduced the idea of operating on the entire array at once. Am I missing something, how is this different from a map?

It keeps going! 3 3 3 ⍴ ⍳10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 M ← 3 3 3 ⍴ ⍳10 M*M 1.00000E0 4.00000E0 2.70000E1 2.56000E2 3.12500E3 4.66560E4 8.23543E5 1.67772E7 3.87420E8 1.00000E10 1.00000E0 4.00000E0 2.70000E1 2.56000E2 3.12500E3 4.66560E4 8.23543E5 1.67772E7 3.87420E8 1.00000E10 1.00000E0 4.00000E0 2.70000E1 2.56000E2 3.12500E3 4.66560E4 8.23543E5 That's 3 nested 3x3 matrices, and we take th…

Incidentally this property is why most of the "translations" of APL expressions into another language you'll see online are cheating- they assume a specific rank for arguments and "bake in" an appropriate degree of mapping.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#213

Post by igouy »

jbotz wrote: post #125

Both ML and Smalltalk are definitely not dead, not even mostly dead, they’ve just evolved into language families whose members have different names. The ML family has Standard ML, OCaml, and Haskell, and the Smalltalk family has Pharo, GemStone, GNU Smalltalk, and others. These all may not have hugely wide adoption, but they are actively used in both academia and industry, and continue to grow and evolve, and their c…

> definition of "mostly dead"

It's easy enough to understand — just look at when they were very much alive.

"UbiquitousApplications:Embedded Systems to Mainframe"

http://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#214

Post by pjmlp »

dleslie wrote: post #169
pjmlp wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are indie games.

Naturally Kotlin and Swift are in mobile games, they are part of the user space official SDK languages

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#215

Post by pjmlp »

davedx wrote: post #51
pjmlp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My introduction to C++, was Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS, in 1992. Until 2001, you had Mac OS, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, EPOC, Telligent, ill fated Coplad, SOM, COM, CORBA, Newton all using C++ as the main programming language for enterprise applications.

The argument is why C++ hasn't died, and the video games industry has undoubtably contributed to its staying power. Most of the things you list have replaced C++ with other languages.

I am not saying it hasn't contributed, rather that it hasn't been a critical factor to keep C++ around, the OS SDKs have been it.

Had Apple, Microsoft, Google decided otherwise and game community opinions wouldn't matter.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#216

Post by igouy »

bhaak wrote: post #53
jhbadger wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there was an affordable Smalltalk system in the early 1990s -- Digitalk's Smalltalk/V. It cost $99 and came with a huge manual that had a great tutorial. It introduced me (and lots of others) to the whole idea of object-orientation.

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.

> download it from somewhere for free

The Smalltalk vendors provided student licenses / educator licenses.

Back in 1998, "…the largest object-oriented course in the world: the Open University’s new introduction to computing, for which over 5,000 students have enrolled for its first year. The course introduces computing from a systems-building stance specifically, through object technology, Smalltalk and our own adaptation and extension of Goldberg’s LearningWorks programming environment."

[pdf] https://www.academia.edu/33568403/An_Object-oriented_Approac...

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#217

Post by michaelmrose »

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).

This suggests we clarify what is meant for a language to be "mostly dead". If we consider size compared to total market or trajectory we may ultimately conclude that a project for example Clojure is "mostly dead" compared to JavaScript or java.

However this isn't ultimately the most useful metric. Would you for example select a restaurant based on the reviews and the cuisine or to total annual revenue of its parent company. If your metric suggests you forego surf and turf at a local diner in order to eat a Whopper you may be asking the wrong questions.

For your consideration here is a better one. A language is alive when its ecosystem is likely to receive enough interest and talent to continue to develop enough to allow its users to continue to accomplish useful goals. Being embedded in 2 of the top platforms and being able to reuse those libraries is a factor. Relying on these host platforms means that it can remain alive indefinitely while being useful to only thousands instead of millions as long as it drives enough interest to pay the salaries of the dozens who develop the core and the hundreds that write useful tools.

https://clojure.org/news/2020/02/20/state-of-clojure-2020

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#218

Post by igouy »

linguae wrote: post #15
ldeangelis wrote: post #8

Great article, I love learning more about language influence. I was wondering something: > Smalltalk wasn’t the only casualty of the “Javapocalypse”: Java also marginalized Eiffel, Ada95, and pretty much everything else in the OOP world. 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. Maybe i…

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…

> …Java caused a revolution of sorts by providing free-as-in-beer…

Yes, when a well funded corporation gives away programming language runtimes and development tools — that puts language and development tool vendors out-of-business.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#219

Post by igouy »

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.

> …cost money, but not that much…

Knowing no-better, $0 seems better to most.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#220

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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.

I still write and actually still (sorta-kinda) like PHP, but there's no major concept/feature I can think of that's intrinsic to PHP rather than inherited from other languages. The Perl (and general "C-like language" influence is notable, and as PHP has matured it's started to feel ever more like Java. ("To write a simple PHP server app, first just initialize your PSR-11 compatible dependency injection container and add your PSR-7 compatible HTTP request/response handlers to it...")
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