61–70 of 161 posts
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…
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…
In uni we had to make a spreadsheet software.
I volunteered to do the formula parser, thinking it sounded like a fun challenge.
I was stumped for a week, until I realized I could rewrite the formulas into a form I knew how to parse. So it would rewrite 1+1 into ADD(1,1) and so on.
I also refused to learn regex, so the parsing code was "interesting" ;)
I recall a comment from a colleague. "Okay, Andy says it works. Don't touch it." XD
Guy from another group used regex and his solution was 20x shorter than mine.
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__', '__floo…
I wonder if my formal university python training predated this change (~2010), or if the professors were themselves unaware of this.
Isn‘t FORTRAN also a ur-language? It was invented in 1957.
Technically, FORTRAN is the oldest. One could argue that ALGOL is the most influential for language design.
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…
Would be very glad to read this.
In the meantime, I reproduce a part of an article by Steve Yegge:
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What Computers Really Are
Another realization I had while reading the book is that just about every course I took in my CS degree was either invented by Johnny von Neumann, or it's building on his work in mostly unintelligent ways.
Where to start? Before von Neumann, the only electronic computing devices were calculators. He invented the modern computer, effectively simulating a Universal Turing Machine because he felt a sequential device would be cheaper and faster to manufacture than a parallel one. I'd say at least 80% of what we learned in our undergrad machine-architecture course was straight out of his first report on designing a programmable computer. It really hasn't changed much.
He created a sequential-instruction device with a fast calculation unit but limited memory and slow data transfer (known as the infamous "von Neumann bottleneck", as if he's somehow responsible for everyone else being too stupid in the past 60 years to come up with something better. In fact, Johnny was well on his way to coming up with a working parallel computer based on neuron-like cellular automata; he probably would have had one in production by 1965 if he hadn't tragically died of cancer in 1957, at age 54.)
Von Neumann knew well the limitations of his sequential computer, but needed to solve real problems with it, so he invented everything you'd need to do so: encoding machine instructions as numbers, fixed-point arithmetic, conditional branching, iteration and program flow control, subroutines, debugging and error checking (both hardware and software), algorithms for converting binary to decimal and back, and mathematical and logical systems for modelling problems so they could be solved (or approximated) on his computing machine.
-Steve Yegge, Math Every Day
Reminds me a bit of Bruce Tate’s approach in 7 languages in 7 weeks, which is where I first encountered Erlang. I think from a historical perspective, describing COBOL and Fortran as part of the ALGOL family is a stretch, but I suppose it’s a good reminder that all history is reductive.
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.
Fortran is one of the reasons OpenCL lost to CUDA, and now even AMD and Intel have finally Fortran support on their own stacks, not Khronos based.
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-fortran
Whereas Cobol, even has cloud and microservices.
https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...
https://aws.amazon.com/mainframe/
Incredible how being monetary relevant keeps some languages going.
Also note how the beloved UNIX and C are from 1971 - 73, only about 10 younger than COBOL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GP is just trying to convince you that thinking is "rapidly redundant in the LLM age".
(GP here) Its true that we need to be cautious about continuing to exercise our thinking muscles, undoubtedly. Ofc you can do that without using legacy techniques, but each to their own.
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…
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…
https://www.t3x.org/amk/index.html
You can just get the code without buying the book, learn with Simply Scheme or any other book and apply the functions from the code, the solvers are really easy to understand.