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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#221

Post by michaelmrose »

Scarbutt wrote: post #195
pansa2 wrote: post #190

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).

Can you explain and support the idea that the number users using the language productively declined? The state of Clojure survey seems to have held steady at 2500 from 2015 to 2020 with 60% saying they used it for work in 2015 vs 69% saying they used it for work in 2020.

Going back to 2010 we see less than 500 respondents and only 27% using it for work. A charitable assumption is that it grew substantially between 2010 and 2015 and held steady between 2015 and 2020.

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

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#222

Post by amyjess »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #202
kick wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's very similar to Go. And like go, it's loved by people who don't know ALGOLs and hated otherwise.

That's definitely an uncommon comparison.

Go is basically Oberon with C-ish syntax, and Oberon is probably the Wirthiest of Wirth languages, basically everything Wirth thought was good distilled into a single language. And given that Wirth's whole family tree of languages exists because he objected to Algol 68 so hard he walked out on Algol...

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#223

Post by QuesnayJr »

FpUser wrote: post #119
QuesnayJr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me years before I stopped accidentally typing ":=" in my C code.

I switch quite often. Sometimes 3 languages a day: Delphi/Lazarus/FreePascal, C++ and Javascript so it now takes few minutes to adjust.

I try not to switch too often, just because I find it hard to remember the details. The one that always stumps me the most is comments -- I always stare for several seconds trying to remember how comments work in that language.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#224

Post by yiyus »

carapace wrote: post #146
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.

I think Forth's influence is more subterranean. I.e. PostScript and coreboot, etc. Forth is there, but rarely in your face. As far as the underlying concepts, speaking as someone who has experimented recently with Joy (one of the concatenative languages you mention. although it wasn't directly influenced by Forth, I think, it's a case of convergent design), I think it's a shame it hasn't been more influential. The ti…

Joy is a great language! I also wish it had been more influential.

Maybe you already knew this, but there are lots of great articles about Joy in nsl.com, and there is also Thun: http://joypy.osdn.io/ (which someone suggested me around here).

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#225

Post by V-2 »

"COBOL was also enormously complex, even for today’s languages"

Is that true? What was the complexity about? I've never done COBOL, but I was always under impression that it was quite straightforward in its infamous clunkiness, lacking lots of constructs that've been obvious for decades now

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#226

Post by peter303 »

Reads like the graveyard of my high school and college languages

BASIC 1970 high school computer hacking

LISP 1972 MIT A.I. course

APL 1973 MIT circuits course

PL/I 1973 MIT systems programming course

OS360 Assembly MIT systems programming course

FORTRAN 1974 MIT physics research

C 1976 Stanford research

PASCAL, ObjectPASCAL 1984 Macintosh developer

ObjectiveC 1987 NeXT Developer

C++ 1986 scientific programming

Java 1994 scientific programming

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#227

Post by badsectoracula »

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.

It was probably too late (around 1996 to 97), but there was Smalltalk Express which was essentially Smalltalk/V for Windows that was released for free after ParcPlace and Digitalk merged. It never received any updates though and was only a Windows 3.1 program. It also came with a lengthy tutorial (actually a 16 chapter book) in HTML format.

Here it is running under Windows 10 (thanks to otvdm/winevdm that allows running 16bit programs in 64bit windows): https://i.imgur.com/r5aQNyJ.png

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#228

Post by diego_moita »

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…

Lua's implementation of "object oriented programming" is also entirely based on Self's.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#229

Post by evgen »

Stranger43 wrote: post #204
mxyzpt1k wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with perl and this kind of list is that in reality it's just an elegant way of writing awk/sh scripts with proper flow control, i.e. like python today it was seen as an way to get around the compatibility and performance issues associated with shell/awk in the bad old days of commercial Unix. It might sound strange to modern eyes but there was an time when Perl was considered elegant and robust, but then…

In my mind what Perl brought to awk/sh was not flow control but rather data structures that did not make you want to kill yourself. Its standard library also delivered a lot of core sysadmin functionality back in the day and the reporting/output features fit very well with what was needed for early web CGI scripting.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#230

Post by fulafel »

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).

I think the mostly dead classification implies a decline, vs a non-mainstream mindshare of all developers.
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