Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

web.cs.ucdavis.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#31

Post by linguae »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #8

Who are Wirths, Dijkstras, Hoares, McCarthies and Keys of today? I mean - who represents current generation of such thinkers? Genuinely asking. Most stuff I see here and in other places is about blogposts, videos and rants made by contemporary "dev influencers" and bloggers (some of them very skilled and capable of course, very often more than I am), but I would like to be in touch with something more thoughtful and…

There is a lot of good computer science, but the computer science community today is vastly larger than it was in the 1960s and 1970s when Dijkstra, Knuth, Wirth, and others became legends. There are so many subfields of CS, each with its own deep literature and legendary figures. It’s difficult to be a modern Dijkstra or Knuth due to these factors, though to be fair, it is an impressive feat for Dijkstra to be Dijkstra and for Knuth to be Knuth even in their heydays. It’s just easier to get famous in an upstart field compared to getting famous in a mature field.

I think there are two typical paths to widespread visibility across CS subfields: (1) publishing a widely-adopted textbook, and (2) writing commonly-used software. For example, many computer scientists know about Patterson and Hennessy due to their famous computer architecture textbooks, and many computer scientists know about people like Jeff Dean due to their software.

Reading more academically-oriented literature such as the ACM’s monthly periodical “Communications of the ACM” is also a good way to get acquainted with the latest developments of computer science.

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#32

Post by vincent-manis »

pjmlp wrote: post #4
palad1n wrote: post #2

I think the legend goes Wirth created the Pascal language to be the most easily compilable. To show my age, I recall a class used Modula-2 when I was in college, also from Wirth, very Pascal-like.

Nowadays you can enjoy it on GCC, as it is now an officially supported frontend, after GNU Modula-2 got merged into it. https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.2.0/gm2 Even available on compiler explorer to play with, https://godbolt.org/z/ev9Pbxn9K Yes, that was a common trend across all programming languages designed by him. That is also how P-Code came to be, he didn't want to create a VM for Pascal, rather the goal…

With all due respect to Wirth, P-Code did not originate in a vacuum. Martin Richards's BCPL compiler, dating from the late 1960s, targeted a hypothetical OCode machine. Furthermore, although there were backends for this that generated good machine code on popular computers of the time, Richards also had a backend that generated a severely reduced instruction set, which he called Intcode. You could write an assembler and interpreter for Intcode in a few hundred lines of Fortran (I did), which meant you could have a slow BCPL implementation on a new machine in a day or so's work, and then you could write a better backend in BCPL.

I have never been able to determine whether Wirth knew of this work, but, given that Richards's 1969 BCPL paper described OCode, I suspect he was aware of it, and that it influenced his design of the Pascal-P compiler. (I am not sure when Intcode appeared, but it was present when I obtained the BCPL compiler in 1972, a year before the Pascal-P release.)

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#33

Post by artemonster »

rramadass wrote: post #25
artemonster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very hot and edgy take: theoretical CS is vastly overrated and useless. as someone who actively studied the field, worked on contemporary CPU archs and still doing some casual PL research - asides from VERY FEW instances from theoretical CS about graphs/algos there is little to zero impact on our practical developments in the overall field since 80s. all modern day Dijkstras produce slop research about waving dynamic…

> theoretical CS is vastly overrated and useless > as someone who actively studied the field, Does not compute. Your comment is mere empty verbiage with no information.

Your critique is valid, but I am not in a mood to prove myself to anons on the internet :)

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#34

Post by artemonster »

pjmlp wrote: post #19
artemonster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very hot and edgy take: theoretical CS is vastly overrated and useless. as someone who actively studied the field, worked on contemporary CPU archs and still doing some casual PL research - asides from VERY FEW instances from theoretical CS about graphs/algos there is little to zero impact on our practical developments in the overall field since 80s. all modern day Dijkstras produce slop research about waving dynamic…

Indeed, we don't really need affine type systems, what use could we get for them in the industry. /s

If you really have followed the research in type systems and see how it *factually* intersects with practical reality you wouldnt joke about it. Its a bizzare nonsense what they do in „research“ and sane implementations (only slightly grounded in formalisms) are actually used

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#35

Post by pjmlp »

artemonster wrote: post #34
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, we don't really need affine type systems, what use could we get for them in the industry. /s

If you really have followed the research in type systems and see how it * factually* intersects with practical reality you wouldnt joke about it. Its a bizzare nonsense what they do in „research“ and sane implementations (only slightly grounded in formalisms) are actually used

I do, and hope that one day stuff like dependent types and formal proofs are every day tools, alongside our AI masters, which also don't use any learnings from scientific research.

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#36

Post by kjs3 »

artemonster wrote: post #33
rramadass wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> theoretical CS is vastly overrated and useless > as someone who actively studied the field, Does not compute. Your comment is mere empty verbiage with no information.

Your critique is valid, but I am not in a mood to prove myself to anons on the internet :)

"I come to talk low-effort shit, not to think or inform". Par for the course, I suppose.

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#37

Post by cmontella »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #22
cmontella wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contemporary PL designers who have inspired my programming language design journey the most are people like Chris Granger (Eve), Jamie Brandon (Eve/Imp/others), Bret Victor (Dynamicland), Chris Lattner (Swift / Mojo), Simon Peyton Jones (GHC/Verse), Rich Hickey (Clojure), and Jonathan Edwards (Subtext). My favorite researcher is Amy J. Ko for her unique perspective on the nature of languages. Check out her language "…

Thanks for pointers

Also I just became aware of this list: https://people.futureofcoding.org

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#38

Post by rramadass »

artemonster wrote: post #33
rramadass wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> theoretical CS is vastly overrated and useless > as someone who actively studied the field, Does not compute. Your comment is mere empty verbiage with no information.

Your critique is valid, but I am not in a mood to prove myself to anons on the internet :)

I am not the "anon" here; you are.

You made a preposterous statement, got called out, and are now making excuses.

Anybody who claims to have studied "Theoretical Computer Science" can/will never make the statements that you did (and that too in a thread to do with Niklaus Wirth's achievements who was one of the most "practical" of "theoretical computer scientists"!).

Here is wikipedia for edification - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_computer_science and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#39

Post by rramadass »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #8

Who are Wirths, Dijkstras, Hoares, McCarthies and Keys of today? I mean - who represents current generation of such thinkers? Genuinely asking. Most stuff I see here and in other places is about blogposts, videos and rants made by contemporary "dev influencers" and bloggers (some of them very skilled and capable of course, very often more than I am), but I would like to be in touch with something more thoughtful and…

Researchers in Programming Languages and Compilers (a large list!) - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mleone/language-people.html

Programming Language Research (categorized by subjects) - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mleone/language-research.html

Re: On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]

#40

Post by rramadass »

linguae wrote: post #31
wolvesechoes wrote: post #8

Who are Wirths, Dijkstras, Hoares, McCarthies and Keys of today? I mean - who represents current generation of such thinkers? Genuinely asking. Most stuff I see here and in other places is about blogposts, videos and rants made by contemporary "dev influencers" and bloggers (some of them very skilled and capable of course, very often more than I am), but I would like to be in touch with something more thoughtful and…

There is a lot of good computer science, but the computer science community today is vastly larger than it was in the 1960s and 1970s when Dijkstra, Knuth, Wirth, and others became legends. There are so many subfields of CS, each with its own deep literature and legendary figures. It’s difficult to be a modern Dijkstra or Knuth due to these factors, though to be fair, it is an impressive feat for Dijkstra to be Dijks…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257461
Post reply on HN