Timeline of programming languages | Hacker News Reader

Timeline of programming languages

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56 pointsgeospeck23 comments

Anyone brave enough to bet which ones are going to turn out big ?

Swift has a big potential in the sense that it's backed by Apple, and looks like Objective C reimagined for Apple's purposes.

Rust has Mozilla backing, and it's already popular around here, so I won't elaborate.

Extra points for naming languages which will succeed despite not being initially corporation-backed.

Swift will rise and fall with iOs. Rust will gradually eat Unix tooling, and supplant C.

WebAssembly will be really interesting. It could finally be the tech layer that replaces the JVM. I'm not sure what the winning language will be though.

Swift is more like C++ reimagined for Apple. It doesn't have the pervasive late-binding dynamism that made Objective-C such an interesting and powerful minimalist extension of C. (However that minimalism was already lost when Apple started bolting random language features onto Obj-C sometime around 2010.)

Elm has a fair chance of distinguishing itself for client-side webapps, because the language and its library are a complete holistic design for that exact domain. i.e. it's not yet another general purpose language, or yet another piecemeal JS mutation.

In terms of web-oriented languages that are succeeding despite not being company-backed, Haxe is my personal favorite. Its flash target improved on AS3 compilers back in the day, and is now providing a bridge for old Actionscript developers to exit their collapsing walled garden.

Crystal will likely come through on many promises and be more widely adopted. Some more polish and it will be great to use.

Interesting that PHP, Ruby, and Javascript were all created in 1995.

Java as well (public alpha release).

If a fellow wikipedia editor is reading: some recent languages like Pony, Purescript and Reason are still missing.

It's also missing a lot of details that should be added from http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...

Always a fun discussion when someone calls a language old. "ColdFusion? That old language? You should use Javascript or Ruby or Python and get with the times!"

Only 17 new languages in last decade? Why such dramatic slowdown in contrast with earlier decades?

Honest but cynical answer: deletionist Wikipedia editors rained down the delete hammer on most new languages a while back. They now have very high requirements for notability, so unless a language is old enough to be mentioned in print sources (which are increasingly not relevant to the advancement of human knowledge), then it's unlikely to have its own page on Wikipedia.

In all fairness, although I'm pretty much solidly in the inclusionist camp, lists like this on Wikipedia can turn into this vast laundry list of everyone's pet hobby project or master's thesis. You could probably delete 75% of that list and not remove anything that was commercially important or historically significant.

I guess that one could solve this by making Wikipedia more semantic-driven: imagine being able to filter through the laundry list by measuring relevance using Github statistics (is it still maintained? was it starred by more than 100 people?) - you could have a lot information and still be able to digest it by prioritization. What do you think?

But this goes back to notablility. Wikipedia's policies are to cover content that is notable. It sounds like what you are looking for is discoverability. GitHub already does this. People are making, sharing, and forking "awesome lists". You can make a PR to learnxiny's languages list. Wikia will vendor lock and host your programming language dedicated mediawiki for free. Mediawiki is free and open source software that powers Wikipedia that you can run on almost any cpanel based web host.

That's just one example. There are all sorts of lists like "Notable people from X city" that get pretty ridiculous.

One could add queryable criteria there as well.

Didn't know that python was actually older than java

Interesting. I had the impression ML was older :)

ML first appeared in 1973. Pretty impressive considering the laundry list of features, many of which are missing from mainstream industrial languages. For example: parametric polymorphism (aka "generics"), pattern-matching and type inference.

lol, I hate the words "parametric polymorphism" had it as a question in an university exam and failed, because I only learned "generics" and "templates" xD

love the concept tho

The problem with the word "generics" is that it already meant something else in programming language theory. If I used reflection to implement a serialisation function in Java or C#, it could be generic with respect to the data-type of the value passed in, but not parametric. A parametric polymorphic function strictly has the same behaviour for all types, a generic one has type-dependent behaviour. This matters of course when we want to reason about programs.

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