(2022) and unfortunately advice to spend significant amounts of time in learning multiple languages is becoming rapidly redundant in the LLM age.
These are tools for thinking with, so not obsolete.
The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
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Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
#12(2022) and unfortunately advice to spend significant amounts of time in learning multiple languages is becoming rapidly redundant in the LLM age.
Not at all. That’s like saying learning how different kinds of engines work is redundant in the age of taxis. You don’t have to know any of this stuff in order to get from A to B. But if you want to understand the processes involved in getting there, or you maybe want to be the one that builds a better self-driving vehicle, this is where you should start.
Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
#13I might add another class of languages: those intended to express proofs, via the Curry-Howard correspondence. Lean is a primary example here. This could be considered a subclass of functional languages but it might be different enough to warrant a separate class. In particular, the purpose of these programs is to be checked; execution is only secondary.
Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather COBOL is a living fossil? And today's Fortran is the FORTRAN family with horizontal gene transfer from the Algol lineage of programming languages.
Can COBOL be called a living fossil? I mean, programming languages do not live; and they do not "die", per se, either. Just the usage may go down towards 0. COBOL would then be close to extinction. I think it only has a few niche places in the USA and perhaps a very few more areas, but I don't think it will survive for many more decades to come, whereas I think C or python will be around in, say, three decades still.…
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Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
#15there's a few more semantic families: verilog, petri nets and variants, Kahn process networks and dataflow machines, process calculi, reactive, term rewriting, constraint solvers/theorem provers (not the same with Prolog), probabilistic programming,
plus up and coming (actual production-ready) languages that don't fit perfectly in the 7 categories: unison, darklang, temporal dataflow, DBSP
It may feel like a little bit of cheating mentioning the above ones, as most are parallel to the regular von Neumann machine setup, but was meaning for a while to do an article with 'all ways we know how to compute (beyond von Neumann)'.
Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
#16- Algol 68 docs: https://algol68-lang.org/resources 'a68g' it's a free as in freedom compiler. - Forth: you can use PFE,Gforth for ANS Forth requeriments. Or EForth if you reached high skills levels where the missing stuff can be just reimplemented . EForth under Muxleq: https://github.com/howerj/muxleq I can provide a working config where a 90% of it would be valid across SF. Starting Forth, ANS version: https://www…
Or for Lisp you might as well start with Emacs Lisp - you are going to use it for a decent environment unless you have the Common Lisp IDEs which you have to pay for or Racket.
Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
#17My favorite subject when studying CompSci (TU Delft) was called "Concepts of programming languages". We learned C, Scala (for functional) and Javascript (prototypes).
It made learning Elixir years later much easier.
We also had a course that basically summed up to programming agents to play Unreal Tournament in a language called GOAL which was based on Prolog.
For years I've wanted to use Prolog but could not figure out how. I ended up making a spellcheck to allow LLM's to iterate over and fix the dismal Papiamentu they generate.
Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
#18This article is full of gross mistakes. For example it claims that Caml is "Cambridge ML" which is ridiculously false. Fact check every sentence. Really sad.
Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
#19there's a few more semantic families: verilog, petri nets and variants, Kahn process networks and dataflow machines, process calculi, reactive, term rewriting, constraint solvers/theorem provers (not the same with Prolog), probabilistic programming, plus up and coming (actual production-ready) languages that don't fit perfectly in the 7 categories: unison, darklang, temporal dataflow, DBSP It may feel like a little b…
also Sussman's propagators are nice to check out [0]
[0] The Art of the Propagator (mit url down for the moment)
Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
#20This article is full of gross mistakes. For example it claims that Caml is "Cambridge ML" which is ridiculously false. Fact check every sentence. Really sad.
For those curious: Cambridge ML is a thing, but abbreviated CML[0]; and whilst Caml is part of the ML family, it appears to be unrelated to CML.
[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/FoundsCS/usingml.html