Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun • Hacker News Board

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#21

Post by mononcqc » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 2:28 PM UTC

Erlang actually came from needs in proprietary languages like PLEX and other stuff used within Ericsson. The ideas were to have better concurrency (not parallelism) and better fault tolerance (through distribution and whatnot), properties that were thought to be too hard to do with other languages at the time.

That it has lisp influences and was implemented in Prolog first speaks of the creators of the language, not what it attempted to fix in there. And I seriously doubt that fixing lisp syntax was an objective in the language, especially given Robert Virding, one of the original 3 creators of Erlang, now has his own lisp syntax on top of the BEAM VM as LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang).

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#22

Post by pavpanchekha » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 2:38 PM UTC

alttag wrote: post #16

perlgeek wrote: post #13

I found it particularly amusing that Common Lisp solved the "too many dialects" problem, being a Lisp dialect itself...

Of course it is. XKCD explained this a few weeks ago: http://xkcd.com/927/

In this case, it actually seemed to solve it. A lot of the older lisps died off as a result of CL. Scheme and Dylan were really the only survivors for a while. IIRC.

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#23

Post by windsurfer » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 2:41 PM UTC

gizzlon wrote: post #2

Cool =) But who says perl has "no support for Japanese"? Don't think that's true

People who don't understand unicode ;)

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#24

Post by Symmetry » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 2:44 PM UTC

ColinWright wrote: post #6

Where do people think "D" should be put? What arrows with what labels?

C++ -> D "Kludge"

Java -> D "But I liked manual memory management."

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#25

Post by davedx » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 2:47 PM UTC

Java (controlled by Sun) -> C# (controlled by Microsoft)

Sensible?

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#26

Post by Symmetry » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 2:47 PM UTC

lawlit wrote: post #12

What do you think Go fixes ?

C->Go "Better syntax, please" or maybe "But I need built in support for concurrency"

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#27

Post by sequoia » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 2:50 PM UTC

Javascript was developed to replace Java... do tell.

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#28

Post by tarmil » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 2:52 PM UTC

Methinks it lacks "Pascal -> Need contracts -> Eiffel"

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#29

Post by diminish » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 3:07 PM UTC

rauljara wrote: post #3

The enhanced version is completely different from the regular version. Not only are the reasons different, but a lot of the languages don't even inherit from the same sources (the regular version had javascript coming from java. wtf?). Just goes to show how arbitrary/silly it all is. Still pretty awesome. Why did haskell come about? "Lazy evaluation is cool, yo."

fortran is apparently fixes machine code

Re: Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun

#30

Post by Sukotto » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 3:10 PM UTC

Yes the chart has errors, yes some of the vectors make no sense. Yes, your version of the chart would differ greatly (hell, his "enhanced" one differs significantly from the basic one.)

Cut the guy some slack. He put the work in and the result is a pretty cool look at how he makes sense of the way various languages interrelate and borrow from each other. There are others showing the way other people think [1] and I hope some of you will try your hand at it.

[1] Personally, I really like the one O'Reilly did a few years back: http://oreilly.com/news/graphics/prog_lang_poster.pdf I suspect I tend to think more linearly than the OP