A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

"Brief. incomplete, and mostly wrong," could also describe the state of knowledge in huge swathes of the programming industry concerning huge areas of knowledge in their own field.

EDIT: For example, the widespread misunderstanding of what ASM.js is and the inability of many to predict the speed it has achieved. Another example: the (pleasant) surprise at the speed of V8 and other Javascript VMs. In both these cases, people who have been paying attention to history knew what was going to happen well in advance of most of the industry.

Re: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

#5

Post by yuvipanda » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 5:17 PM UTC

Didn't this make the rounds like, 2 weeks back?

Re: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

#6

Post by ColinWright » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 5:19 PM UTC

Here are a few previous submissions - I've marked the ones that have significant discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164 (+)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1310127

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327746 (+)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1475826

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896 (+)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507566

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586462

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129062

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377944

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 (+)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728843

Re: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

#7

Post by kps » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 5:20 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #4

"Brief. incomplete, and mostly wrong," could also describe the state of knowledge in huge swathes of the programming industry concerning huge areas of knowledge in their own field. EDIT: For example, the widespread misunderstanding of what ASM.js is and the inability of many to predict the speed it has achieved. Another example: the (pleasant) surprise at the speed of V8 and other Javascript VMs. In both these cases,…

And without “history”, since that might get in the way of making the same mistakes over and over and over again.