The seven programming ur-languages (2021)

Post by em-bee » Thu, May 04, 2023, 8:57 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #59

codeflo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that the "message passing" style of OO (which I always hated as a term, because it implies asynchronicity, but I digress) is firmly something else than the "classes and interfaces" style of OO, and that it's an unfortunate accident of history that we give them the same name.

I think part of the problem of trying to separate the two is that the most prominent implementations appear deceptively similar on the surface, even with unfamiliar syntax. E.g. put even Smalltalk in front of someone familiar with C++, and they'll quickly latch on to the similarities once a few of the basics are explained, to the point that explaining message passing as different from method invocation is tricky, not…

Post by blowski » Thu, May 04, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

castorp wrote: post #142

ngruhn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok fair enough. I suspect that's a pretty non-standard/rarely-used feature though. If you learn SQL you likely won't encounter this and I still contest the idea that SQL is a good entry into the logic paradigm. SQL and Prolog are both relational. That's very unique to both. But SQL is all about querying databases. Prolog can also be used and understood as a database querying language but it's also very strong for - p…

> I suspect that's a pretty non-standard/rarely-used feature though. If you learn SQL you likely won't encounter this Recursive common table expressions are part of the SQL standard (since 1999) and are quite frequently used to traverse hierarchical data (aka "adjacency list"). It is part of basically all (good) SQL tutorials - at least in the "advanced" part.

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Post by jimbokun » Thu, May 04, 2023, 9:16 PM UTC

weatherlight wrote: post #124

gumby wrote: post #5

An article like this is hard to write. This is a good one. I have a few quibbles, but they are just quibbles. IMHO* a distinguishing feature of Algol like languages (aka "procedural" languages) is the distinction between expressions and statements. Though personally I've never seen the appeal, that distinction seems to be popular for some reason. * this isn't even a quibble -- the article is fine without it. Just som…

There is no difference between expressions and statement in Ruby (a descendent of the Agol Family). Everything evaluates to a value so everything is an expression. (to be fair, it took a lot of inspiration from Smalltalk and LISPs)

Post by ThinkBeat » Thu, May 04, 2023, 9:38 PM UTC

Post by colonwqbang » Thu, May 04, 2023, 10:05 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #80

colanderman wrote: post #56

I think reactive/synchronous languages [1] deserve a category of their own. They share little/no overlap with any of the others. My background in electrical engineering biases me to Verilog, VHDL, and LabVIEW as exemplars, but there are many others. The distinguishing characteristic of the category is that programs are effectively declarative functions of time and can be composed as such, much like electronic circuit…

My education was in EE but I switched over to programming ASAP. So my take on Verilog/VHDL is, like, super uninformed/perpetual honeymoon/starry-eyed. But it always seemed to me that these HDLs, since they fundamentally are pretty low-level and asynchronous, if translated to assembly somehow, ought to expose a ton of instruction level parallelism.