XSLT. Hahahahahaha!
Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
#32When was any? I find these sorts of things crumble in your hands, because as soon as you pick a candidate you find yourself thinking "but that was just a variant of such-and-such earlier idea."
I think you are right - all that we have now is ultimately derived from the structure of the underlying machine and that model has not undergone any fundamental change since the earliest iterations. For a truly transformational step we need a new machine.
That's interesting. I'd like to see a machine that uses continuous rather than discrete logic. I think there would be less of an impedance mismatch with humans.
Re: Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
#33The question reminds of the notion of processes and channels in Occam with constructs for parallelizing based on Tony Hoare's CSP theory.
It's a good thing I read the thread before commenting because that was exactly what I was going to write! Naturally you've got my vote. Let me add a bit of history to reduce the 'me too' content: There was an interesting hardware development at the same time which was specifically tailored to these channels, the 'transputer' by INMOS. The whole upshot of this idea was that processors and a bit of support structure wo…
You might be interested in XMOS (https://www.xmos.com/), a start-up ran by David May formerly the architect of the Transputer and the designer of Occam at INMos, who are creating new parallel processors based around a parallel variant of C called XC.
Re: Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
#34When was any? I find these sorts of things crumble in your hands, because as soon as you pick a candidate you find yourself thinking "but that was just a variant of such-and-such earlier idea."
Thus does the creator of Arc manage to compress the entire career of James Burke into a single sentence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
Not that the long-form version isn't entertaining as well.
Re: Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
#35Alan Kay has been asking this question for a long time now. His "Viewpoints Research Institute" is doing some interesting work in this direction. http://vpri.org/ One of their projects is to see if they can build a complete software stack -- from the OS through the GUI and networking/graphics libraries to end-user software -- all in 20,000 lines of code total. They have already made some major progress in the past fe…
I really applaud they're effort, and I'm an incredible fan of Alan Kay, but I think they're jumping the gun. They weren't required to change the stack. It's helpful, sure, but I think they should have waited until they hit beautiful enough technology that would require such a change (as beautiful enough technology will).
And focusing on code size is possibly misleading, as code size does not exactly equal orthogonality.
Re: Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
#36When was any? I find these sorts of things crumble in your hands, because as soon as you pick a candidate you find yourself thinking "but that was just a variant of such-and-such earlier idea."
Thus does the creator of Arc manage to compress the entire career of James Burke into a single sentence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) Not that the long-form version isn't entertaining as well.
That was my favorite TV series of all when I was a kid.
Re: Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
#37Inversion Of Control principle and Dependency Injection - 2002-2005. That is single possible answer.
Is there a difference between IoC and callbacks? In any case, I don't think it can be said to be -quite- that recent.
Re: Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
#38Don't know how transformational it has been yet, but I feel the idea that all side effecting code needs to be specifically noted by the programmer, a la Haskell, will one day be seen as a watershed.
We're only at the very early stages of the parallelisation of hardware, but as that trend intensifies, I can't imagine compiling efficient code without explicit compiler knowledge of what code might side effect.
Re: Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
#39How about regular expressions as an essential part of a modern, general purpose language (rather than a separate mini-language)?
Re: Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
#40What's funny is that even all the latest trace-compiling (V8, TraceMonkey) and JIT-ting (lots of others) implementation technologies for dynamic languages date from the early 80s (the Schiffman-Deutsch JITting Smalltalk compiler, specifically).
Though there was also a fair bit of Self optimization work going on at the same time--don't know if Alan's and Peter's work was the very first of its kind.