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Why study programming languages (2022)

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Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#21

Post by binaryturtle »

shevy-java wrote: post #20

Old languages died or are barely in use anymore. I think it is more interesting to see which languages are still used today and how popular these are. Because this is also tied to the human user/developer. For instance, I used BASIC when I was young - not as a professional but as a hobbyist. I liked it too. I wouldn't use BASIC today because it would be entirely useless and inefficient.

But is that a problem of the language itself, or is it just a problem of available toolchains? E.g. if the gcc compiler collection would come with BASIC support and you just could type something like "gbasic -O3 foobar.bas -o foobar" to get a properly optimised executable out of your BASIC source code file then some may would still use BASIC today, I guess?

I started with BASIC too. Also enjoyed BlitzBasic2 for a long time on the Amiga. That's where I learned programming… back then when programming was still fun.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#22

Post by MoltenMan »

binaryturtle wrote: post #21
shevy-java wrote: post #20

Old languages died or are barely in use anymore. I think it is more interesting to see which languages are still used today and how popular these are. Because this is also tied to the human user/developer. For instance, I used BASIC when I was young - not as a professional but as a hobbyist. I liked it too. I wouldn't use BASIC today because it would be entirely useless and inefficient.

But is that a problem of the language itself, or is it just a problem of available toolchains? E.g. if the gcc compiler collection would come with BASIC support and you just could type something like "gbasic -O3 foobar.bas -o foobar" to get a properly optimised executable out of your BASIC source code file then some may would still use BASIC today, I guess? I started with BASIC too. Also enjoyed BlitzBasic2 for a lon…

Realistically? No, not at all. The reason there are no toolchains for BASIC is because nobody uses BASIC (because it's not functional in our modern world), not the other way round.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#23

Post by jonathanstrange »

shevy-java wrote: post #20

Old languages died or are barely in use anymore. I think it is more interesting to see which languages are still used today and how popular these are. Because this is also tied to the human user/developer. For instance, I used BASIC when I was young - not as a professional but as a hobbyist. I liked it too. I wouldn't use BASIC today because it would be entirely useless and inefficient.

I was never more productive than with REALBasic, it was a true RAD tool, and I'd happily use Xojo nowadays if it wasn't so expensive. That's a "modern" structured BASIC so I guess not what you had in mind.

One thing I've learned over the years is that the language is almost irrelevant, the tooling and 3rd-party library support are much more important.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#25

Post by ramon156 »

When studying programming languages you really have to focus on the why's.

When I was learning Rust I started out just associating patterns with lib types. Need to dynamically hold items? Vec. Need a global mutex? install lazy_static.

This is fine if you're beginning, but at some point you need to read about why people choose this. 9/10 times there's a more elegant option you didn't know about because you just did what everyone else does. This separates programmers from coders.

The only reason I learned this was because my current company has programmers, not coders. I learned a ton from them

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#26

Post by agumonkey »

keyle wrote: post #2

I tries to answer the question "Why do we design new programming languages?" but it forgets the simplest of answers: Because we can. Because a compiler is nothing more than a fancy text translator.

linguistic constructs will direct your brain when solving problems and may help you discover solutions spaces you wouldn't with another set of idioms

not to promote FP but imperative stateful vs closures/function oriented is quite a strong example of that

a different paradigm can really be a massive intellectual tool

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#27

Post by ryandv »

Programming languages are obsolete in the LLM era. What current generation AI has revealed is that English is actually the ultimate representation of computer programs and systems, which is both sufficiently terse and precise to economically describe the operation of arbitrarily complex programs.

There is no reason to study programming languages in 2025, other than as a historical curiosity - the same way one may study languages equally as pitiable as e.g. COBOL, Lisp, or MIPS assembly.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#28

Post by eptcyka »

pjmlp wrote: post #12
WalterBright wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because what we know about programming has progressed, and new languages appear to take advantage of that.

Many new languages are still recycling ideas from the 1970's research labs. Outside affine types, all the praise for Rust's type system traces back to Standard ML from 1976. The heretic of doing systems programming in GC enabled programming languages (GC in the CS sense, including RC), goes back to research at Xerox PARC, DEC and ETHZ, late 1970's, early 1980's. Other things that we know, like dependent types, effect…

Aside from bringing in the groundbreaking feature, Rust doesn't bring in any groundbreaking changes. It could be argued that bringing in lesser known features to more people is a good thing in it's own right.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#29

Post by zweifuss »

doyougnu wrote: post #24

I still like Olin Shiver's take on this: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/papers/why-teach-pl.pdf

There is something to the existence of fads and fundamentals. When I started, it was Object-Oriented-Programming (with multiple-inheritance and operator overloading, of course), Round-Trip Engineering (RTE), XML, and UML.

IMHO, not the ideas were bad, but the execution of them was. Ideas were too difficult/unfinished/not battle-tested at the time. A desire for premature optimisation without a full understanding of the problem space. The problem is that most programmers are beginners, and many teachers are intermediate programmers at best, and managers don't understand what programmers actually do. Skill issues abound. "Drive a nail with a screwdriver" indeed.

Nowadays, Round-Trip Engineering might be ready for a new try.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#30

Post by christophilus »

ryandv wrote: post #27

Programming languages are obsolete in the LLM era. What current generation AI has revealed is that English is actually the ultimate representation of computer programs and systems, which is both sufficiently terse and precise to economically describe the operation of arbitrarily complex programs. There is no reason to study programming languages in 2025, other than as a historical curiosity - the same way one may stu…

Sarcasm, right?
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