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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#251

Post by downerending »

goto11 wrote: post #52
tyingq wrote: post #25

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/

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.

I think it would be fair to give Perl that credit. When it was first released, there really wasn't anything else like it. There was sh/csh, awk, sed, but nothing that really showed the path forward as Perl did.

That said, once Python 1.5.2 (or so) hit, Perl was done for. It was simply better, and there was no reasonable way for Perl to recover the lead, or even really coexist. Perl had a lot of momentum and took many years to decline, but that was the tipping point, in my mind.

It remains to be seen whether Python3 will displace Python2. :-)

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#252

Post by bonzini »

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…

Isn't that a pointwise exponentiation (1^1, 2^2, 3^3, ...)?

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#253

Post by pjmlp »

amyjess wrote: post #222
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Oberon-2 merged with Limbo to be more precise, actually.

Although Oberon not only had Oberon-2 as successor, it had Active Oberon, Oberon.NET, Zonnon, Component Pascal and Oberon-07, the later with multiple revisions.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#254

Post by rst »

For all the mentions of FORTRAN in the description of other languages, it's a real surprise that FORTRAN doesn't rate a mention of its own -- though there are corners of the world where it's still in use.

It's notable not only for being the Lingua Franca of scientific computing through at least the '80s, but also for breaking ground in programming language technology, starting right at the beginning -- the Fortran I compiler, for the IBM 704 in 1957, was the first to have an optimizer (and the technical papers on that compiler introduced terminology which has since become standard to the field -- e.g. "basic block").

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#255

Post by pjmlp »

linguae wrote: post #239
igouy wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …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.

This is something else I've been thinking about lately as I read more about Smalltalk and Lisp. The people who have used the commercial Smalltalk and Lisp offerings from the 1980s and 1990s, including Lisp machines, seem to have had great experiences with these environments. They felt very productive in these environments, and they also lament the state of today's development tools for more popular commercially-used…

That is why many of us that experienced those environments ended up gravitating around Delphi, Android, iOS, Java and .NET tooling.

While not the same, it is the most mainstream stacks that are somehow close to those ones.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#256

Post by pjmlp »

jhbadger wrote: post #48
linguae wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Yes, that was the one I was using at the Smalltalk programming classes at the university.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#257

Post by pjmlp »

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?

Generics, contrary to common wisdom it was CLU that actually introduced checked exceptions not Java, alongside Mesa one of the first modular languages.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#258

Post by skissane »

why_only_15 wrote: post #109
skissane wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did C++ survive the advent of Java? One reason: the mainstream JVM, HotSpot, is written in C++. As such, the production Java ecosystem is not self-hosting and relies on C++ to be sustained. (Writing a JVM in just Java is doable, and some research JVMs have done it, but that approach hasn’t yet been fully productionised.)

There are probably >100,000 c++ devs out there, and ~100 of them work on HotSpot. I don't think the HotSpot devs are significant in encouraging c++ usage

I think it demonstrates the point - that if Java is not able to be fully self-hosting in practice, then there are significant gaps in its abilities – and those same gaps in its abilities that drove HotSpot devs to implement HotSpot itself in C++ instead of Java also drive other projects to choose C++ over Java.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#259

Post by dleslie »

pjmlp wrote: post #250
dleslie wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know for a fact that teams at EA are using such tech, as are teams at Microsoft and others. Also, thumbing your nose at Indie games is odd, considering the sales they've enjoyed and the extent to which the industry has adjusted to adapt to their surge in popularity. I can't imagine Nintendo in the 90s treating indie devs the way it treats them today.

Everyone is using Swift and Kotlin when targeting iOS and Android, it is either them or Objective-C and Java. C++ doesn't have full access to OS APIs and some integration is always required.

What's your point? That you agree that game developers are using new technology?

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#260

Post by igouy »

linguae wrote: post #239
igouy wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …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.

This is something else I've been thinking about lately as I read more about Smalltalk and Lisp. The people who have used the commercial Smalltalk and Lisp offerings from the 1980s and 1990s, including Lisp machines, seem to have had great experiences with these environments. They felt very productive in these environments, and they also lament the state of today's development tools for more popular commercially-used…

> They felt very productive in these environments…

Of course, it may have felt productive — lots of mousy interaction and tight focus engagement — without being so very productive.

> … development tools … product of research organizations or are "subsidized"…

https://www.jetbrains.com/ ?

http://esug.org/data/ESUG2003/lars@2bbak@2besug.pdf

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