231–240 of 291 posts
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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 I get the impression you're an outsider looking in, relying on decades out of date personal experience to understand what they see.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
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.
Pascal have two moments which really peak. Turbo pascal and Apple Mac. After that not sure what its use. Ucsd pascal always slow.
Does anyone know whether Turbo Pascal DOS/Windows compiler produced slower code than C compilers at the time? For a long time I was sticking with Pascal and resisted switching to C, even when everyone around me was doing so. One thing I do seem to remember from that time was that the things people were coding up in C seemed to work faster (not sure if it was Borland's Turbo C or something else). It was one of the arg…
What was probably the case is that there were more C compilers so some of them produced better code than Borland's.
There are a few things present in COBOL that I would like to see lifted into more modern languages. One is the use of the full stop as an expression terminator, as in English, instead of the semicolon. Another is the whole "picture" mechanism for number formats. More languages should also steal Verilog's use of _ as an optional digit separator. It's just arrived in C# 7.
I love both languages (well c99 anyways), but I feel like Pascal/C is like betamax/vhs. I think I it didn't help that free Pascal compliers were harder to come by. IIIRC
I’ve seen multiple statements from people that Pascal was a better language than C, but I absolutely love the VHS/BETA-Max analogy (it contains a lot of context which usually take a good deal longer to write out in the pascal vs c discussions). My education and experience effectively skipped Pascal, other than mentions that it existed. So, do you have any off the cuff reading or materials that demonstrate where Pasca…
Looked at Eiffel for a hot sec in college but it never stuck, because no toolchain for beos, which I used in college.
These days I program in elixir, and am learning Zig.
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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…
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 had access to C/C++ in high school on a PC only because my father ran an engineering group and brought home a VC++ license for us. I didn't get to use it that much before heading off to college.
I mostly used BASIC early on cause we had it free with the first 2-3 PCs we had. By High School I had gotten my hands on Turbo Pascal for free, maybe again through my father. High School classes were in Pascal. Turbo Pascal blazed and worked even on our 286 IIRC, which had minimal graphics capabilities. Even once we got a 486 TP was so lightweight compared to booting up windows that probably helped it's popularity for people who were stuck on PCs at home.
As soon as I went to college I always had access to C/C++ and that's what classes were taught in, and by Winter 95/96 we were all getting linux up and running and started having access to all the GNU stuff for doing our work.
I'm a younger millennial (born in early 90s) who got his start with BASIC. The first programming I did was on Q-BASIC on our aging desktop machine (386 with Windows 3.1) that we didn't use for much, especially with very limited Internet use. When I took programming in high school, we started with TI-BASIC on TI-83 calculators for about a month, as my programming teacher felt like this best replicated his experience l…
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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…
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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.
However, it takes a large amount of money in order to develop something like a modern-day Symbolics Genera. Where is the money going to come from? There seems to be little room in today's marketplace for modern-day equivalents of ParcPlace or Symbolics, or even Borland for that matter, since free tools are good enough for many developers. Inexpensive Unix workstations from Sun and DEC helped kill the Lisp machine, and Linux on ever-faster and ever-cheaper x86 PCs helped kill the Unix workstation market; good-enough-and-affordable seems to do better in the marketplace than polished-and-expensive. It seems to me that development tools and operating systems seem to be either the product of research organizations or are "subsidized" by companies where developer tools and operating systems are not their main businesses unless the operating system is a monopoly.
I don't see an easy way around this, though. Maybe if someone like Alan Kay or Richard Gabriel visited a FAANG campus and convinced its engineers to build their infrastructure on top of a new object-based operating system, we'd finally get a modern, full-featured Smalltalk or Lisp operating system that's at par with the commercial Smalltalks and Lisps from the 1980s and 1990s....
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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.
As someone who works at a company where Perl is used as duct tape, we've slowly but surely been ripping it out piece by piece and replacing it with Python (and by "we", I mean "me"). 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…