Programming Languages
increment.com
increment.com
It's better to submit a specific article and then people can discuss what it says.
It's the same thing with the XBase languages like dBase, Clipper, and FoxPro.
I'm not sure if it's just poor research skills with such articles, or just a general ignorance of PC software development history, but these languages and products were an integral part of the PC revolution.
My favorite was the Crash Course in Compilers:
https://increment.com/programming-languages/crash-course-in-...
The best I could find was a Wikipedia page, they're sorted by alpha which I find not very useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages
Does anyone know of a better resource?
If I built a simple DB that had all this info and interfaces (web, API) that folks could use to query or contribute, would anyone find this useful?
Not a single functional or declarative language. What a waste of an article.
Remains the best and most accurate article on programming languages available.
https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...
These articles have no logical connection to each other, it's just random bits.
I find that problematic - the only thing holding these articles together is the consistency of the layout and illustrations. In a world where there are more scientific papers, talks, blogs and books than I can consume in my lifetime, I'm not sure what this brings to the table.
The real difficulty is in parsing in all this information, and producing something that explains how the pieces can fit together nicely. This does not do that.
If your complaint is that they are not sufficiently about programming languages, well. That seems wildly petty.
https://increment.com/programming-languages/language-history...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...
What does the magazine article do better than that Wikipedia article? Wikipedia has hyperlinks - the thing that differentiates paper magazines, from the internet. The article doesn't.
The wikipedia article is more thorough, you can actually go and explore.
I just don't understand the authors or the publishers - they seem to be re-inventing the wheel that Wikipedia in the case of programming languages, has solved by spending much more time, care and expertise on it.
This is a fundamental problem with the internet - it's filled with people re-inventing things that need not be re-invented. Maybe I'm just a grump, I'm sorry.
In parallel, there's a ton of legacy stuff that needs to be re-invented [1], but people are too caught up developing the umpteenth MVC framework for Javascript.
[1] I don't mean shitty reinventions where a lot of time and effort is wasted rediscovering the reasons for why the original system wasn't so bad after all.
I've re-written existing projects, as a personal learning experience. I've written out my thoughts on computer science, people, life, etc. I just didn't go publishing it on HackerNews, or thought it was worthy of anyone else's time.
I don't necessarily agree with you that things need re-invention as it stands. I think it'd really help to gain some clarity on what it is we're trying to accomplish in the first place, before we go off doing. What are we trying to do here really and why? If we asked that question for one minute, perhaps we'd not have top engineers at places like Facebook, perfecting newsfeed spam algorithms. We'd perhaps rethink things for one minute and realize oh wait, we can change the world instead. I don't know, I'm a dreamer, maaan :)
Measure twice, cut once - I see computer science as a field of people running around with scissors, not entirely sure what scissors are good for, just knowing they're getting paid good money to cut by following StackOverflow cutting manuals, or if they think they're fancy, by reading 'category theory' and coming up wth libraries with 0 documentation that no one can use without also thinking they're fancy, and reading category theory, sigh :)