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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

hillelwayne.com

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Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#21

Post by QuesnayJr »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #16
evgen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As cool as E was, it was almost entirely based on core ideas lifted from Joule and KeyKOS. I can't really see any influence beyond a "wouldn't it be great if language X had feature Y like you find in E".

I was also thinking of the community, as they moved out into other languages and carried some ideas with them that they maybe got exposed to in the E community.

Are there active languages influenced by E? I came across that erights site years ago, and I always meant to learn more about it.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#22

Post by andybak »

diggan wrote: post #18
andybak wrote: post #13

Lisp? (ducks for cover) I know someone writing Smalltalk on a daily basis for this system: https://kyma.symbolicsound.com/

The article is about "mostly dead" languages. Lisp lives on under many forms, Common Lisp, Clojure and Racket being some of the more popular ones. If we're only talking about influential languages, I'd agree with you and put lisp on the top.

I was being slightly facetious knowing the crowd round these parts.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#24

Post by abrolhos »

pjc50 wrote: post #7

There are a few things present in COBOL that I would like to see lifted into more modern languages. One is the use of the full stop as an expression terminator, as in English, instead of the semicolon. Another is the whole "picture" mechanism for number formats. More languages should also steal Verilog's use of _ as an optional digit separator. It's just arrived in C# 7.

C++ has an optional digits separator too. Not '_' but single quotes, since c++14 [0]. Which is cool. Swift has it too [1].

Erlang has the full stop '.' as expresssion/statement terminator [2].

[0] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/integer_literal [1] https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/ReferenceManual/LexicalStr... [2] https://erlang.org/doc/getting_started/seq_prog.html

I like those features too! I'm glad they are coming to contemporary languages.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#25

Post by tyingq »

Expecting to see Perl in an article like this in 5 to 10 years. Wasn't the first language I learned, but there's a fond place in my heart for it. At the time, it was the (only) less painful way to get at sockets, libc calls like getpwnam(), etc. I know the TIOBE index is flawed, but...ouch: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#26

Post by dleslie »

> The interesting question isn’t “Why did Smalltalk die”, it’s “Why did C++ survive”. I think it’s because C++ had better C interop so was easier to extend into legacy systems.

Video Games. From around 1999 to recently, C++ was the language of game development. It only recently came under serious threat, from C#.

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#28

Post by fanf2 »

j-pb wrote: post #10
linguae wrote: post #9

Another highly influential programming language not listed in the article is Self ( http://www.selflanguage.org ). Although I've taken two graduate-level courses in programming language theory, I didn't learn about Self until just a few years ago when I was bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp bugs and started reading about the history of these languages and their environments. One of Self's most significant contribution…

Self has an even bigger legacy, the JVM is basically all the technology that made Self fast ported over to Java. David Ungar pioneered not only Self and prototype based inheritance, but also generational garbage collection, and polymorphic inline caching. Before Sun cannibalised the Self team into Java, it was actually slow as a snail. Another fun fact, a reduced version of Self was used the programming language for…

Then Lars Bak (who worked on Self and HotSpot) used the techniques to make JavaScript fast with v8

Re: Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

#29

Post by ngcc_hk »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #20

That was an incredibly interesting article. I never quite grasped the historical significance of CLU. Something I always wonder about COBOL, since it has so little influence on other languages, is if there are good ideas that we missed out on.

Guess online and efficient.

Done my 10k lines batch COBOL. It is a waste of life. Verbose. C is better but unfortunately it is not very io. Still ...

batch COBOL with mainframe parallel io sub-processor helps a lot.

May be the cics where 1000+ users can use a pc (3-5 mips even emulated) with 16MB is something unusual.

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