[HN Gopher] A brief, incomplete, and mostly wrong history of pro...
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A brief, incomplete, and mostly wrong history of programming
languages (2009)
Author : zdw
Score : 129 points
Date : 2023-06-25 20:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (james-iry.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (james-iry.blogspot.com)
| seriousman123 wrote:
| [dead]
| barberpole wrote:
| >Capitalization Of Boilerplate Oriented Language
|
| this is not only true of COBOL, my friend.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| This just reminds me of how far Scala has fallen. The 3.0
| debacle, the fact that the community had a civil war, it really
| is a shame considering how it's SO close to being a strongly
| typed python replacement.
|
| Programming Scala is the closest to just expressing how I think.
| For people who love C#, it has all the best C# features and an
| even more expressive type system.
|
| Everytime I have to write Go, Python or C++ at work I'm missing
| features from Scala. :(
| lightbendover wrote:
| Scala was the only time in the past decade I actually enjoyed
| programming, but it wasn't a great idea to use for our relative
| large team as the amount of expression allowed comes at the
| expense of subjecting others to your mental model of how things
| should be done and having them spend undue time grokking it. I
| view this largely as a deficiency in style guidance, but Scala
| attracts very opinionated people in my experience and I say
| good luck to any style guide being upheld across a large org or
| team.
|
| Kotlin has been nothing but great for me though. (Different
| company). It's largely the best parts of Scala for me and
| without the headaches that come from some allowed patterns.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >I view this largely as a deficiency in style guidance, but
| Scala attracts very opinionated people in my experience and I
| say good luck to any style guide being upheld across a large
| org or team.
|
| That's a great point, and probably one of the biggest
| downfalls of Scala. Not only did it _allow_ for both
| 'java++' style programming, it also had full on almost
| 'haskell' style as well, and the community was split on which
| way was better!
|
| So yeah, any given codebase in the company could be a very
| tight, neat, compact monad transformer heavy functional
| program, or it could be a mess of untyped actors passing
| messages around to mutable state ridden monstrosities!
| eropple wrote:
| I felt that way for quite a while, and still miss Scala
| sometimes, but I find that TypeScript does a really good job of
| letting me express in the type system what I actually want.
| (Yeah, it's got some holes, yeah I miss the JVM, yeah
| JavaScript is lurking under there, but I can correctly write
| code that other people can understand in short order and the
| compiler will scream very loudly if people push my code's
| buttons wrong.)
| patfla wrote:
| It'd be interesting to bring this up to date.
| spion wrote:
| We need entries for Rust and Zig
| ant6n wrote:
| A lot of Zig happened in between trips to Spicy Village (true
| story, rc w17).
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33001242 - Sept
| 2022 (1 comment)
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages (2009)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559618
| - June 2021 (31 comments)
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages (2009)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11936058
| - June 2016 (24 comments)
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages (2009)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7796142
| - May 2014 (13 comments)
|
| _A Brief And Mostly Wrong History Of Programming Languages_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149634 - Jan 2014 (22
| comments)
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages (2009)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6953863
| - Dec 2013 (12 comments)
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages (2009)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504217
| - Oct 2013 (8 comments)
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages (2009)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816
| - May 2013 (33 comments)
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896 - Jan
| 2012 (45 comments)
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327746 - May
| 2010 (13 comments)
|
| _A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming
| Languages_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1310127 - May
| 2010 (1 comment)
|
| _A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming
| languages_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164 - May
| 2009 (14 comments)
| travisgriggs wrote:
| It's interesting to me that there are multiple calls in the
| comments for updated entries (rust, zig, elixir, etc). But no one
| has actually thrown one down here. I notice that no one even
| mentioned Swift or Kotlin.
|
| For me as a long time practitioner of many languages, one of the
| telling points is that most/all of the new entries I might write
| for any of the newer languages would lack personality.
| Historically, languages had opinions about things. C was common
| assembler. Smalltalk was objects. Lisp was lists. You could
| easily riff on these languages "first principles."
|
| Modern languages feel more like political committees trying to
| keep as many constituents happy as possible.
| jeltz wrote:
| Zig very much has opinions about things and is not created by a
| committee. I suspect that is why people here want to see it
| included. Rust is s bit of s mixed bag, while it has strong
| opinions it also suffers w bit from committee design but that
| is true for C++ too which is in the article.
| mepian wrote:
| "In a history of Smalltalk I wrote for ACM, I characterized one
| way of looking at languages in this way: a lot of them are
| either the agglutination of features or they're a
| crystallization of style. Languages such as APL, Lisp, and
| Smalltalk are what you might call style languages, where
| there's a real center and imputed style to how you're supposed
| to do everything. Other languages such as PL/I and, indeed,
| languages that try to be additive without consolidation have
| often been more successful." -- Alan Kay in
| https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
| arun-mani-j wrote:
| My favorites of this evergreen article:
|
| 1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak,
| Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical
| Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict,
| functional language.
|
| 1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in
| designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates
| LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of
| Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an
| effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language
| is renamed ECMAScript.
|
| This article should be updated to include TypeScript, Rust, Zig,
| Nim etc.
| andrepd wrote:
| > 1991 - Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum travels to Argentina
| for a mysterious operation. He returns with a large cranial
| scar, invents Python, is declared Dictator for Life by legions
| of followers, and announces to the world that "There Is Only
| One Way to Do It." Poland becomes nervous.
|
| Lmaoo
| adrian_b wrote:
| Besides the main text, there are many comments with
| appropriate corrections, e.g.:
|
| "Jacquard's loom wasn't concurrent? It was pretty thoroughly
| multithreaded, I'd have thought!"
| rerdavies wrote:
| 2015 - Graydon Hoare invents the Rust programming language,
| which breaks everything by fixing a problem that nobody
| actually has.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| in case it isn't loading for you too:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230625182521/http://james-iry....
|
| my favorite part: > Haskell gets some resistance
| due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects.
| Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a
| monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"
| momentoftop wrote:
| I was at Edinburgh when this came out, and it went round the
| mailing list. Wadler replied saying he wasn't aware of the
| fact, and wanted to know the proof.
|
| I was sharing an office a few floors down with Roko of Basilisk
| fame, who was the category theory guy. He thought about it for
| a few minutes and then took us through the proof on the board.
| jll29 wrote:
| 2022 A research charity called "OpenAI" accidentally breeds a
| language model in its lab (by feeding most of the Web into a
| neural network) that can generate code on request - and quickly
| morphs into a for-profit. Instantly, Google sheds 12,000 coders,
| anticipating a strong decline in coding skill demand.
|
| 2023 Rust, then the "most liked programming language", gets
| forked off as "Crap" by a subgroup of haters in brown t-shirts,
| so that they can have a proper in-fight. In an interview, an
| anonymous rebel leader states "I guess I got bored of the vi vs.
| Emacs debate a bit, so I was looking for something new."
| joeythedolphin wrote:
| Why do you believe or know that the 12,000 fired were related
| to AI and coding not needed? 1. Google search, YouTube is dying
| 2. What % were coders? 3. Where was it stated this is related
| to AI competition?
| voz_ wrote:
| How does it taste, this onion?
| jroseattle wrote:
| Needs a recursive function iterating through JS frameworks of the
| past 20 years.
| mepian wrote:
| The mention of Arc really dates it. I'm disappointed that pg
| moved on from it so quickly, there was a lot of hype around Arc
| during its conception but now I rarely hear about it even though
| I follow everything Lisp-related obsessively.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| At least for me, part of the allure of the Lisp way of thinking
| is that it's perfectly okay, even desirable, to whip up an
| entire language just for one project.
|
| My favorite part of SICP is this quote:
|
| > It is no exaggeration to regard this as the most fundamental
| idea in programming:
|
| _The evaluator, which determines the meaning of expressions in
| a programming language, is just another program._
|
| >To appreciate this point is to change our images of ourselves
| as programmers. We come to see ourselves as designers of
| languages, rather than only users of languages designed by
| others.
|
| For me, Arc primarily being used for writing HN is not a sign
| of failure, but a great example of why Lisps are cool and can
| really lead to revolutionary thinking.
| mepian wrote:
| There is a distinction between making a new metalanguage, and
| making a new embedded language in an existing metalanguage.
| SICP and others promote the latter, while Arc (from my
| recollection) was supposed to be the former - the next big
| metalanguage.
| Zambyte wrote:
| SICP definitely promotes both. The latter could be done
| without ever writing eval, which is the climax of the book.
| jksmith wrote:
| The first rule of D is...
| [deleted]
| edbaskerville wrote:
| [dead]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| This has been around on HN quite a few times - so many that I'm
| just going to say "try the 'past' link" rather than pasting them
| all.
| shric wrote:
| Indeed, even 11 years ago people were commenting on how many
| times it had been posted with substantial amounts of comments
| and upvotes:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3505201
| Waterluvian wrote:
| My favourite kind of bullshitting is this. Ie. when you mix
| plausible lies with definite lies and the truth, messing with the
| brain.
|
| Like how cereal was invented by a joint US Army/Navy programme to
| invent a resilient, easily transportable, high nutrient non-
| perishable food product for wartime use on ships and in the
| trenches. The programme of course being run by Admiral Kellogg
| and General Mills.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| But where does Captain Crunch fit in?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think you're talking about Lt. John "Captain Crunch" Sydney
| (referred to as "Captain" when in command of his tugboat) who
| earned the nickname when he rather infamously pushed a cargo
| barge full of grain into a dairy transport causing both ships
| significant hull damage and making a rather soggy mess.
| teddyh wrote:
| <https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/apes-will-rise>
| aidenn0 wrote:
| This is one of my favorite evergreen posts on HN. If there were
| posters of it, I'd buy one. So many good lines to choose from,
| but I'll just highlight this one today:
|
| > Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes
| them popular by not having them
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| This one tickled me a lot
|
| >Brad Cox and Tom Love create Objective-C, announcing "this
| language has all the memory safety of C combined with all the
| blazing speed of Smalltalk." Modern historians suspect the two
| were dyslexic.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| But the entry for Java doesn't mention that it doesn't have
| Lambdas. I assume that the Java that is mentioned has them?
| brenns10 wrote:
| Java added lambdas in version 8, around 2013, after this was
| written. They probably omitted the lack of lambdas for the
| joke regarding C#, since it had lambdas since around 2007.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Not sure if this just is my algorithm but this page is the top
| hit if you google for "mostly wrong"
| anoncow wrote:
| It's for me as well.
| layer8 wrote:
| And the 3rd and 4th are HN submissions of the page, for me.
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