This isn’t “opinionated”, it’s biased and poorly researched..
It seems opinionated is frequently used as synonym to poorly researched nowadays.
An opinionated history of programming languages
101–110 of 135 posts
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#102Which functional programming languages have managed to build a solid user base?
What language would you recommend to someone trying to get into FP? I was considering Haskell but don't know enough about the ecosystem to make an educated choice for the language.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#103I 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…
Labeling something as "opinionated" shouldn't be an exception to fact checking and discussion. Unfortunately, the term "opinionated" and often alsoe "opinion" is used exactly like that. This makes this term a huge red flag for me.
I am perfectly fine, if people take a controversial point of view, especially when entering a discussion. But then this should be the starting point for a discussion, not the ending point.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#104"FORTRAN: Unlikely to influence anything in the future due to remarkably poor design". Stops reading there
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#105Earlier 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.
> I want a modern C.
As in, a minimalist language aesthetic or fast low-level non-gc? Golang only has the aesthetics, Zig has both.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#106I wonder where BASIC would fit into this chart? Anyone care to enlighten an old basic programmer? It was my first language maybe 30+ years ago when I was a kid...
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#107I wonder where BASIC would fit into this chart? Anyone care to enlighten an old basic programmer? It was my first language maybe 30+ years ago when I was a kid...
(and I've hidden the shame ever since lol)
Assembly was cool back in the day Z80, 68000... then C, but I felt too stupid to learn that stuff when I was a kid. Ugh. ;-)
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#108I 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…
The asterisk is basically worthless on this chart. The very premise of a "Mature high-performance high-complexity compiler/runtime" contains 3 orthogonal categories. Common Lisp satisfies all three, and lacks an asterisk.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> only insofar as they have affected currently important languages If this is meant to be any kind of history, that would seem to be grounds for inclusion. After all, Bourne Shell gets a spot, even though it's not actually a language and hasn't influenced any other language to any significant degree (unless you consider Tcl and even that's a big stretch). It seems like many things were included merely as excuses to e…
Bourne Shell is a clear influence on Perl and PHP. And by the way, Bourne Shell was a influenced by C.
It's also marked "Unlikely to influence anything in the future, due to remarkably poor design", yet there's still a line drawn from it.... to Erlang?? but not Perl.
I can't extract any value at all from this chart.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like most of the interesting history is missing, perhaps because it happened before the author was born.
The author seems to have restricted the entries to languages still taught and used, but missed COBOL and maybe C#. I can't really blame him, in either case.
He also missed PHP...