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An opinionated history of programming languages

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Re: An opinionated history of programming languages

#92

Post by nestorD »

devmunchies wrote: post #80
adenozine wrote: post #67

I see a lot of users forgetting that it's an opinionated history. The author hasn't claimed to make this exhaustive. Further, it's a bit counterproductive to just point out f"Hey, what about {some_lang}?" Wikipedia has a decent resource to start, if you'd care to take a journey into computation notation history :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag... My own nitpick, to throw in the mix: The…

I’ve been learning ocaml for a few weeks. what makes the compiler sophisticated?

It is fast while having the best type inference capacities I ever saw in a programming language: you can spend years in a static language without ever writting a type (my one exception is deserialization which makes sense).

Re: An opinionated history of programming languages

#93

Post by renox »

aninteger wrote: post #60
UncleOxidant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to know C++. But not sure what's happening here.

This is me too and sometimes I feel like the language is going in two directions. The academic / scholar path where people show off unreadable C++ like this and the business path where professionals that use a subset of the language (mandated by corporate code base or teams) that are competent C++ developers but maybe not writing this complicated C++.

I work in telecoms and 'template like this' show up from time to time sometimes for reasonable reasons, sometimes for 'optimisations' reasons which are not backed by figures (some programmers like to show off).

Re: An opinionated history of programming languages

#95

Post by socialdemocrat »

kortex wrote: post #78
bhaak wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go's design is at the very least controversial and considered poor by a vocal subset of the hackernews and programming community. I'm in the camp of the rationales of Go's design being controversial. But the actual design is not bad IMO. For what Go wants to be (a modern C), it is not a bad design. But who wants a modern C? I don't. But if Go were available in the 90s, I would have jumped at the opportunity to writ…

I want a modern C. I love/hate C. I mostly love Go. It has warts, but the philosophy works _for my brain_. Python will gain usecases as a meta-language as the ability to automatically wrap lower abstraction libaries improves. I see Julia eating much of Python's lunch, then python abstracting its way over julia, just because it can.

Problem is that as Python starts using Julia more and more due to its top notch performance many will eventually question why they even use Python as they will realize Julia is a better language anyway.

Re: An opinionated history of programming languages

#96

Post by socialdemocrat »

thelazydogsback wrote: post #26
Rochus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should there be a link between C++ and Smalltalk?

Well, because OO - and if Simula isn't there, then that's where the link would be. Even if Simula did come first, ST is certainly the "OO root" that most people know, so I'm fine with Simula -> ST -> C++ as a reasonable path.

Yes most people know it because Americans are good at marketing themselves and Norwegians , who made Simula, are pretty bad at marketing because being humble and and not blow your own horn is kind of a big deal.

But I know at the University of Oslo there has been some annoyance that Simula’s place in programming history is so unknown while smalltalk has this outsized role.

Smalltalk definitely inspired Objective-C but C++ is clearly derived from Simula. As a fellow Scandinavian Bjarne was well aware of Simula and an active user of it.

Re: An opinionated history of programming languages

#100

Post by lispm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #97

I know it's an opinionated history, but you may want to draw an arrow from LISP or Common Lisp towards C++, as a good chunk of STL is based on Lisp concepts (and I'm pretty sure I've seen this mentioned explicitly in one of Meyers' books).

C++ as a language has very little influence from Lisp.

I would draw an arrow from Lisp to ML, since FP, GC, list processing etc. came from Lisp - ML was even implemented in Lisp and used the runtime.

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