"FORTRAN: Unlikely to influence anything in the future due to remarkably poor design". Stops reading there
What lessons would you say are left to be drawn from Fortran?
An opinionated history of programming languages
121–130 of 135 posts
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#122"FORTRAN: Unlikely to influence anything in the future due to remarkably poor design". Stops reading there
"FORTRAN: Unlikely to influence anything in the future due to remarkably poor design"
I guess the author of this sentence likely does not know anything about Fortran. They do not even know that the language has NOT been called FORTRAN for more than 3 decades. They do not even know about the latest release of Fortran in 2018. They are at best showcasing your ignorance and bias, by not providing any arguments as to why people should take their comments and advice seriously.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#123"FORTRAN: Unlikely to influence anything in the future due to remarkably poor design" I guess the author of this sentence likely does not know anything about Fortran. They do not even know that the language has NOT been called FORTRAN for more than 3 decades. They do not even know about the latest release of Fortran in 2018. They are at best showcasing your ignorance and bias, by not providing any arguments as to why people should take their comments and advice seriously.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#124Fortran has already made its influence on several major languages, including C and Python. The nice concept of modules that you see in Python (that C++ has just decided to add to the language in year 2020), has existed in Fortran ever since free-format Fortran came to existence, decades ago.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> R has a great packaing system, and it copied Perl I almost used Perl as an example of Python's inverse - a crappy language wrapped in a good packaging system. For its time CPAN was pretty great. All of the things today that people are likely to hold up as being better drew inspiration from it. > which is much older than Python Perl 1987, Python 1989. So yes it's older, but much older?
Fair, I realised that the difference wasn't that large after I posted. I'm just so annoyed by Python's (lack of a) packaging system that it makes me prone to hyperbole. It's been frustrating me at work all week, and I suspect that it will be a low-grade annoyance for me in my career for the next few years, as I'm a Data Scientist and hence need to deal with Python a lot.
pip is a packaging system, and it ships out of the box with Python. It may not be the best one around, but there certainly isn't a lack of one.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#126Earlier 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.
In terms of design influence, Simula is a lot closer to C++, Java, and C# than Smalltalk is, so I don't think that would be accurate even so.
Every time you write "protected" or "virtual", that's Simula speaking.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#127Bourne Shell is the worst language people actually need to learn. At least PHP is a choice.
POSIX makefiles is another.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#128I 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...
It would be heavily influenced by Fortran, but I don't think it heavily influenced anything else.
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can second this. I once implemented my own sparse matrix multiplication because I needed it in numba. Further, the type of automatic differentiation that is possible now is game changing. On the other hand Julia is a terribly designed language in some respects. Compare python error messages to Julias. It has all the problems of c++ templates baked in from the start. And latency is a real issue for now. I am always…
There's actually a lot of work going into making better error messages right now. In 1.6 we're getting better highlighting of them in the REPL to emphasize the parts of the stacktrace that we think are actually relevant to the problem, and there's some discussion about mechanisms to mark functions as 'internal' so that they don't appear in stacktraces unless toggled to do so.
That's great to hear! I am sure there is a lot of room for improvement and that would go a long way! But it also seems to me that with the language as it is now, the compiler simply doesn't have enough information to provide good error messages. E.g. there is no way to express the idea that something needs to be iterable to the compiler. Or that you expect an argument to be a function of a certain type. I'd love to be wrong on this though. :)
Re: An opinionated history of programming languages
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In terms of design influence, Simula is a lot closer to C++, Java, and C# than Smalltalk is, so I don't think that would be accurate even so. Every time you write "protected" or "virtual", that's Simula speaking.
Classes and "virtual" procedures were indeed already part of the original "Simula 67 Common Base Definition" in June 1967, but "protected" and "hidden" were added later (proposed here https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/956003.956009, and probably added to the Common Base Language in 1982).