The Pop-11 Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

The Pop-11 Programming Language

cs.bham.ac.uk

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The links on the page seem broken, I did quick hunt around to get this better central link:

https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplo...

Or direct to the primer:

https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/primer/

Both of which seem like they are more reliable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POP-11

was helpful for me as well

This confused me in many ways; 1) why did someone submit a site that was mostly broken and really didn't show what pop-11 was or looked like, and 2) why did it trend to the front page at all?

Why do people on this site keep pushing sites that are just broken. I really wish there was an automatic down-voting of people that submit sites that are broken, pay-walled, or break the browser in some new and fun way.

I did my Master's at the University of Sussex, where Poplog (including Pop-11) was created. I was there in 2014. I asked one of our tutors how come the university did not teach any of that family of languages (Prolog and LISP variants) to its computer science students anymore. He said that in the '90s, the University had pushed Poplog so hard on students to the exclusion of other languages that were more popular in the industry, and hence more in demand by students, that there had been a backlash against Poplog, and the University had stopped teaching it completely.

This from memory and after questioning on my part that was mainly about teaching logic programming which I was primarily interested in (rather than functional programming).

I studied AI at Birmingham in the 00s and remember having to visit Prof. Aaron Sloman's office with £5 to purchase a hardcopy of the POP-11 primer.

I found it very sad, in the late 80's and early 90's, that POPLOG chose to chase unicorn dreams, instead of broader availability and impact. It seemed a chance to change the world was traded for dreams of fortune, which failing, left only ashes. And the last three decades of programming language dystopia.

I used this in the early 1980s, on a VAX 11/780. It was one of the three languages of Poplog. The other two were Prolog and Lisp. Lisp would have been my preference, but at the time it lacked some important features. I notice Poplog now has Common Lisp, which wasn't available until later.

It also has Standard(?) ML, doesn't it?

Yes, but it didn't when I used it.

Used this at Uni, on Sparc machines, cool you can get it on x86 now, shame I just got an m1.

Sussex? We used it in COGS and I think it was one of very few places teaching with it at the time.

A fondness for this language led me to develop (for fun) my own take on POP11 a few years back. Its kind of ‘POP11 with braces’ (since it uses braces for block and function scope, etc.) — https://github.com/benhj/arrow if anyone is interested.. A lot slower though due to its recursive tree interpreter and no way near as powerful.. one day I might try and implement a byte code compiler / vm for it..

I tinkered with it a little bit. It is surprisingly modern for a language built in the 80s. Unfortunately the development stalled. Would be worth of a new modern implementation.

alot of 404 links

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