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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

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RcouF1uZ4gsC

This course sounds like a long and mostly correct histories of programming languages.

Also consider visiting

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...

For a brief, mostly incorrect overview of programming languages.

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"1970 - Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman create Scheme. Their work leads to a series of "Lambda the Ultimate" papers culminating in "Lambda the Ultimate Kitchen Utensil." This paper becomes the basis for a long running, but ultimately unsuccessful run of late night infomercials. Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them."

OMG, brilliant

> "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"

Everywhere else he had to invent stuff to parody the language. He presents Haskell straight up.

As a Haskeller, I feel obliged to say that that is a parody. A self-parody, perhaps, but a parody nonetheless. In reality, the vast majority of Haskellers (including me!) wouldn’t have a clue what that sentence means — but we’re content to use monads nonetheless, because having a knowledge of the category theory underlying monads is unnecessary if you just want to use them in Haskell.

Yeah, in reality Haskellers are more like: A monad is just like a burrito, whats the problem?

Except that is explicitly a parody/critique of what Brent Yorgey called the "monad tutorial fallacy": https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...

This is the post that originally coined that phrase.

Yeah, in reality Haskellers are more like: A monad is just like a spacesuit, whats the problem?

"1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular[1]. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now "Lisp" or sometimes "Arc") remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension"[2]."

For a more detailed look at the timeline of a programming language feature in the same vein, you may also enjoy the retrospective on Foozles:

https://wiki.hh.se/wg211/images/5/58/Foozles.pdf

Seems only meniton of Snobol is in the comments. Hard to ignore it because Snobol was the first to use associative arrays ("tables"). Awk copied this, then Perl, etc. I do not use Python. I love Snobol because it has an assembly-like feel to it. Much faster than Python.

Icon (the successor to Snobol) was one of the few languages that enlarged my brain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_(programming_language)

/love/s/Snobol/Spitbol/

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