Comment by officialchicken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by officialchicken | Hacker News Reader

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officialchicken

Agree 110% on the blurring, and maybe a 5th category too - 4GL, for SQL and its ilk.

Obj-C, Obj-C++, C++, and C can all co-exist in the same codebase and be complied into 1 output (if you are insane enough to try), similar to CUDA or Fortran with C/C++. That's not really possible with JVM or CLR languages, but not impossible either. Which makes them more like 3GL/OOP while sharing more similarities with smalltalk than 2GL/C.

Py, Lua, GLSL/HLSL, and many others can "mix" or be called by C/C++ similar to CUDA, and Lua is definitely in the interpreted "script stuff" bucket, not statically compiled like Java, C#.

The shader languages like GLSL/HLSL are really confusing to categorize, especially when used with C#, because they can exhibit characteristics of 1GL thru 4GL.

Can't forget the declarative regular and context-free languages.

XLST and other template syntaxes are another interesting case. They look mysteriously like a declarative context-free language but have imperative characteristics of a turing complete syntax.

JVM may not be able to be combined with compiled languages but there are a number of languages that, at a bytecode level are compatible with Java. For example IronPython, Rhino, etc. The same can be said for the .NET environment and languages like VB.NET, managed C++, C#, F#, etc.

Don't even get me started on languages that can output output Javascript. Last I heard, there's over 100 of them now and the list keeps growing.

I'm not sure about GLSL/HLSL because I haven't used them but they sound like they're declarative DSLs (Domain Specific Languages).

Maybe it's about time somebody created an update to the Chomsky hierarchy. Instead of the traditional subset-superset classifications, some other system is used to compose the characteristics of languages.

In the bigger picture of things, it's all very incestuous. Like every language is trying to be like every other language. The winners of the pack are those that everything else compiles/transpiles down to.

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