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The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

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Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

#52

Post by analog31 »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #46

Lots of us are having fun identifying our choice for missing family :) One I might suggest is scripting languages, defined loosely by programming tools which dispatch high-level commands to act on data pipelines: sed, AWK, the sh family, Perl, PowerShell, Python and R as honorary members. In practice I might say SQL belongs here instead of under Prolog, but in theory of course SQL is like Prolog. Bourne shell might b…

I'd add dataflow "languages" such as Excel and LabVIEW.

Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

#53

Post by MichaelNolan »

I’ve very slowly been trying to do the “99 problems” list in each of these languages groups. It’s been a fun experience seeing the differences. Though I think I would need a larger, less algorithmic, project to really see each group’s strengths. Especially for the OOP group.

One thing the article didn’t touch on was SmallTalk’s live visual environment. It’s not a normal source code / text language.

Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

#54

Post by pcblues »

I always enjoy these summaries. I took my bachelor of computer science in the early 1990s. It covered a language in most of these categories.

We didn't learn APL (Who is teaching the use of those custom keyboards to 100s of young students for one semester?)

The processing power of systems at the time made it clear which language classes were practically useful and usable for the time and which were not.

Prolog ran like a dog for even simple sets of logic.

We had the best internet access and pretty powerful desktop systems for the time.

I'm still curious why we didn't learn smalltalk. Could have been the difficulty of submitting and marking a system in a particular state rather than a file of code :)

Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

#55

Post by f1shy »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #29

I wrote something similar here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/blog/GroundBreakingLanguages.html We agree on Algol, Lisp, Forth, APL, and Prolog. For ground-breaking functional language, I have SASL (St Andrews Static Language), which (just) predates ML, and for object oriented language, I have Smalltalk (which predates Self). I also include Fortran, COBOL, SNOBOL (string processing), and Prograph (visual dataflow), which wer…

I don’t understand why self is placed in the list instead of smalltalk. Smalltalk came first, and Alan Key was the one who invented the “OOP” name.

Also ML is seen as a child of Lisp.

Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

#56

Post by pjmlp »

steve_gh wrote: post #25

One correction I'd make to the article's taxonomy: Ruby is an object oriented language not an Algol. Its inspiration is Smalltalk, and much of the standard library naming comes from that route (eg collect rather than map). Ruby is object oriented from the ground up. Everything (and I do mean everything) is an object, and method call is conceived as passing messages to objects. While Ruby is most often compared to Pyt…

Since Python introduced new style classes, it also became a pure OOP language, even though it might not look like it at "Hello World" level, all primitive types have become objects as well.

I love to point this out to OOP haters,

    >>> type(42)
    

    >>> dir(42)
    ['__abs__', '__add__', '__and__', '__bool__', '__ceil__', '__class__', '__delattr__', '__dir__', '__divmod__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__float__', '__floor__', '__floordiv__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getnewargs__', '__getstate__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__index__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__int__', '__invert__', '__le__', '__lshift__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__neg__', '__new__', '__or__', '__pos__', '__pow__', '__radd__', '__rand__', '__rdivmod__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rfloordiv__', '__rlshift__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__ror__', '__round__', '__rpow__', '__rrshift__', '__rshift__', '__rsub__', '__rtruediv__', '__rxor__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__sub__', '__subclasshook__', '__truediv__', '__trunc__', '__xor__', 'as_integer_ratio', 'bit_count', 'bit_length', 'conjugate', 'denominator', 'from_bytes', 'imag', 'is_integer', 'numerator', 'real', 'to_bytes']

Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

#57

Post by lioeters »

gobdovan wrote: post #19
gobdovan wrote: post #15

there'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)

Great list of languages that don't fit the conventional families. I've been curious about some of them, like Petri nets and term rewriting, and will enjoy exploring the others.

Found a working link to the paper about propagators.

The Art of the Propagator, Alexey Radul and Gerald Jay Sussman. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/ar... (PDF)

Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

#59

Post by andai »

Kaliboy wrote: post #17

My 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…

I was there, too. o/

The Unreal Tournament was the coolest thing I've ever seen. I think they shut it down the year after mine. (Now they have boring old regular AI like everyone else!)

I haven't found a good use for Prolog, though I haven't put much effort into it. I admit I was much more impressed by GOAL though, and I didn't realize until recently that you can replicate the whole thing in a more "ordinary" language (and that this gives many benefits). D'oh!

Re: The seven programming ur-languages (2022)

#60

Post by pjmlp »

f1shy wrote: post #55
DonaldFisk wrote: post #29

I wrote something similar here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/blog/GroundBreakingLanguages.html We agree on Algol, Lisp, Forth, APL, and Prolog. For ground-breaking functional language, I have SASL (St Andrews Static Language), which (just) predates ML, and for object oriented language, I have Smalltalk (which predates Self). I also include Fortran, COBOL, SNOBOL (string processing), and Prograph (visual dataflow), which wer…

I don’t understand why self is placed in the list instead of smalltalk. Smalltalk came first, and Alan Key was the one who invented the “OOP” name. Also ML is seen as a child of Lisp.

They should be placed alongside each other, because Self OOP model is quite different from Smalltalk, including how the graphical programming experience feels like.

For those that never seen it, there are some old videos (taken from VHS) on the language site, https://selflanguage.org/

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