A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009) | Hacker News Reader

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)

james-iry.blogspot.com

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2009, but always well worth a re-read, and if it's your first time, congrats on being one of today's lucky 10,000 [0]

[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Oh I definitely am one of the lucky 10k.

Unsure why Diet Coke is always specified. My son and his friends tried grape soda. Inside. It worked just fine.

I've heard (but not tried) that Diet Coke is used because not having sugar, it's less sticky when it dries.

Why thank you

Still love "Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C....."

(On another note, James seems to have written a post back in March of this year. It's been such a long time since he wrote anything I wondered if he ever would again.)

Now back to writing an application in PL/SQL....

"Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them." hahaha

This article is the origin of the infamous joke about Haskell:

> 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?"

Hehe, that's actually how I ended up on this article, trying to understand what is meant by that statement in more detail. I found that apparently the original is from here [0]. :)

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=gfI-BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA138&dq=...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20Brief,%20Incomplete,%20and...

>It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.

Or to not be polite to the compiler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

I can tell it's been a few years since I've read this, because:

His goal is to create a language with the intelligence of a two year old. He proves he has reached his goal by showing a Prolog session that says "No." to every query.

is both more and less funny than it used to be now that I have a two year old.

"Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++" was validating. A friend who has worked on desktop software in C for 30 years has it figured out IMO: he uses the C++ compiler, but always defines no-op constructors. Instead he defines an init() method on each class, which he calls explicitly. Essentially his only use for the C++ compiler is to sort out inheritance and build a correct function dispatch table.

This gives up the significant benefits of RAII, which are made significantly safer and more useful through the use of references and std::unique_ptr. By using initialization methods rather than constructor methods, you create a situation where your destructors don't necessarily make sense and can't be relied on to be dealing with initialized objects (thus increasing the amount of boilerplate code that can fail) or you don't use destructors at all (at which point you regress to the "boy, I hope I scope-guarded correctly and cleaned up along every path of execution!" state of C).

Writing C++ without using C++'s idioms is usually, if not almost always, creating more technical and business risk for the writer and the consumer than using C++'s idioms in the first place. (That some of these idioms are conceptually very difficult is a very valid criticism of C++, and one that Rust in particular seems well-positioned to be better about, but I'd take the bear traps of C++ over the land mines of C almost any day.)

Regarding "recursion and condescension", that's just an unfortunate back-formation from a misunderstood pun.

In a lecture once upon a time, some famous Lisp hacker joked that, if you will, to recurse over tree structure is to "cons descend". A blue-tied Fortran programmer from IBM in the audience didn't get the joke, and walked away with the idea that Lisp programmers are arrogant jerks who even program via condescension.

oh yes James Iry :) must be this time of year again: https://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/james-irys-his...

Absolutely hilarious mix of trolling and absurd by someone that obviously knows what he's talking about. Well played.

Hmmm, I wonder what would be said about Nim, Rust, Racket, Go.... I'm drawing a blank, but those are some recent ones that come to mind.

>1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

>1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Brilliant

Curious to read Rust and Swift entries.

Every time I read it, it's as interesting as the first time!

APL never mentioned.

I've probably read unfunnier articles in my time. But I'm having a hard time remembering when

It needs more additions.

After all the only way Haskell could be conceived is after a very long LSD (needed to grok monads) fueled BSDM (the type system) session.

Edit: Missed Haskell in the article. But I guess you could say the upper for different reasons about angular, enterprise software and spring. Or anything that transpires to JS, due to the build chain and difficulty debugging.

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