Slashdot Mirror
The History of Programming Languages
Dozix007 writes "For 50 years, computer programmers have been writing code. New
technologies continue to emerge, develop, and mature at a rapid pace.
Now there are more than 2,500
documented programming languages and O'Reilly
has produced
a poster called History
of Programming Languages, which plots over 50 programming languages
on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline."
Somehow I think they missed the boat on that one. Delphi is Borland's Object Pascal in a GUI driven environment.
So which couple dozen will we continue to use?
There is another programming language family tree on that page aswell. This was mentioned in a previous story.
People do not typically "flame" about VB's functionality, but rather the breed of programmers and the vendor,IDE and API lock-in which accompany it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
O'Reilly's favorite/bestselling books are the ones with the arrows extended furthest to the right.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Perhaps you should take a look at Common Lisp and its macros.
How could you not like a language whose syntax is > < + - . , [ ]
Its also the smallest compiler ever written.
Ardente veritate incendite tenebras mundi
Maybe a better analogy would be a painter who only has 1 bristle. You can paint the side of a building with 1 bristle, but it would take you a really really long time. That doesn't mean you couldn't do it. You can do anything in assembler if you put your mind to it (and if your mind is good enough ;-)
May no camel spit in your yogurt soup.
Why do they have to make it hard to order a copy of the poster? What if I don't want two extra o'reilly books, and just want the poster? Penny Arcade does this with some of their stuff... the only way to get some of their posters is to fly across the US to visit their conference of choice. Why do they do this?
Actually, the statement
"Its really funny to hear people give the same arguments against Java and C# that are word-for-word the same as what was said about C." is so true as to be almost scary. I recently was looking at the huge arguments against C++ (vs C) and just about died laughing.
To me, it all comes down to two things:
1) Can I do (x) with (new language)?
2) Will it take me longer to do (x) with (old language) than it does with (new language)?
The whole concept of programming can be summed up that way. I have reached the sad state of no longer caring at all about language performance. I have such incredibly tight deadlines to meet now, with so few people, I have to say that programming time is worth dollars while execution time is only worth cents. Especially since about 75% of the work we do is for "one-off" or "disposable" projects. It sucks, but it puts food on the table.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Just before seeing this poster, I was feeling quite confident with my programming skills. O'Reilly just reminded me how ignorant I really am, and how many languages I haven't even heard of. They must have some smart kid working there in the marketing dept., 'couse I'm going right now to buy a few books on some of these mysterious languages... :)
Way to go O'Reilly!
(Shame about the small font though)
Ummm... Just how is that?
Ugly and illegible are matters of opinion - most Lisp people will gladly trade a certain amount of syntactic suger for extensibily. `Slower than compiled languages' is just silly: modern (say, in the last 30 years) Lisp implementations are (a) compiled, and (b) not generally slow.
In general assembly languages *are* more than tools that assign mnemonics (note spelling) to binary patterns, and hence do deserve to be included.
There are macro assemblers which do preprocessing, which ranges from simple to sophisticated, and some which generate different opcodes for the same mnemonic based on what operands are present. Most assemblers also support the evaluation of expressions.
In some cases, the very same assembler language can produce binary for different machines, so there is not necessarily a one to one mapping between assembler and processor.
A generalized Python would be my dream language - Python, but where all the core objects and statements (like "if" or "class") were part of the standard library.
If you went that route, you would eventually realize that python-like syntax is unecessarily complicated, so you would simplify it down.. and you would have Lisp.
I hate to sound like a Lisp weenie, but if you take all these programming ideas and take them "to the logical conclusion", you *have* have a language with a light, uniform syntax, like Lisp has. You'd have to have the same basic constructs that Lisp has. Anything else would have to have some limitations, or would have opportunities for optimization.
Of course, do you really *need* that kind of a language? It's cool that in Lisp you can start with 2-3 constructs and build the entire language out of them, but in general that doesn't really help you write better programs.
editorial: I think Ruby is the "best" language out there, you can't implement all of Ruby in Ruby, but you can do a heck of a lot more than most other languages. But Ruby is still easy to use in the common case, where Lisp unfortunately isn't. And Ruby comes pre-installed with Mac OS X. :-)
It's been tried - see Dylan. As near as I can tell, Dylan didn't take off because:
The Lisp people saw no major advantages to it other than the syntax, and they'd already gotten past that barrier
The non-Lisp people apparently didn't understand that it really was better than C++/Java
Like the one growing here?
Now I'm really confused. Multiple implementations with a common specification hurt Lisp, but Jython and stackless python are not drawbacks for Python?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
He was essentially asking for a Turing Complete language, of which all other languages were special cases. The the thign is, you can't say that FORTRAN is a special case of C, or that Scheme is a special case of Haskell. You can, however, say that all of these languages are special cases of GLOOP. The reason I mentioned GLOOP instead of a turing machine is that a turnign machine isn't a lanuages in the "programming language" sense - It's a computing framework. GLOOP is a programming language that can is Turing complete, but adds no extra functionality beyond that, so you could say that C is a special case of GLOOP.
My blog
This just demonstrates that "old" is not necessarily "obsolete". (not (= 'Old 'Obsolete))
:-).
Presumably *you* were conceived long ago and are still going strong
It was the first programming language for a personal computer.
Well, maybe the first high-level programming language or the first language interpretter, but I'm willing to bet that the machine didn't run basic natively, so the native language must have been earlier.
I know Lisp is not the ideal language - its ugly, illegible, and slower than compiled languages
Wait a minute. I have serious complaints about Lisp, but those are not among them. Let me take those in reverse order:
SLOWER THAN COMPILED LANGUAGES: No, there are compilers for both Lisp and Scheme that generate VERY fast code. There are interpreters that are as fast as Python that are nice to use during development, then you run it thru a compiler and the speed is on a par with C++, when performing similar operations. Of course a small amount of C++ code will often run much faster than a small amount of Lisp code, but that's because a small amount of Lisp code can say so much more than a small amount of C++ source can say. That shouldn't be counted against Lisp.
ILLEGIBLE: Not really, in my experience. I know what you mean, though. After a lot of use, it's still not quite as easy to read (for me) as something like Ruby or Python, which were already pretty clear even before I had written a single line of either. But it's nowhere near as hard to read as Perl still sometimes is for me, and I've been coding in Perl (occasionally) for a decade. Even C++, which I've done a lot of over the last decade, still gets pretty darned hard to read sometimes, such as when using templates to call old-style C APIs.
Lisp is a lot better than that. I've certainly grown to appreciate the way you can build abstractions out of abstractions and the top level is still called the same way as the bottom level. Self similarity at every level of abstraction, so you just have to think about the algorithms and not the syntax.
Trust me that, with practice, Lisp gets much easier to read, though it never seems to get quite as easy as something like Ruby or Python.
UGLY -- of course this is related to legibility. Again, I know what you mean, and I agree in some ways. A simple mathematical expression or loop is quite ugly, I think, compared to the same thing in Ruby or Python.
However, as soon as you leave the simple, built-in stuff and start building your own more complex functionality, you discover that Ruby and Python get uglier and uglier but Lisp still looks the same. As soon as you start trying to express really interesting algorithms (fancy searches, AI stuff, etc.), you'll see the beauty in the simple consistency of the syntax. (Much more true of Scheme than Common Lisp, BTW.)
So, no, I don't have any serious complaints in that regard. There's no speed problem at all and where it is harder to read, it's a small price to pay for the significant power boost that style of syntax gives you when working with really interesting problems.
So, what don't I like? The online community of users, for one. The misanthropes that took over comp.lang.lisp are pathetic. I've never seen a techical discussion group that hostile and defensive. Don't even think of asking them questions that might clear up some of your skepticism about Lisp. The fact that you have any doubts makes you unworthy of being treated with anything other than utter hostility.
They love Common Lisp like a religion, and hate everything, and everyONE else, even natural allies like Scheme. Common Lisp fossilized sometime back in the Reagan Administration and has since lost almost all ability to improve. As a result, the vast majority of former users have abandoned it and those who remain almost have to take a position that there is no further NEED for improvement except in trivial ways (more libraries, more "complete" implementations, etc.) that, if you think about it, are merely restatements of the "nothing needs to be improved" notion.
And that brings me to what I like least: it seems that the fundamental ideas underlying all forms of Lisp (incl. Scheme) are fascinating, and if redone in a way such as Paul Graham's Arc (www.paulgraham.com) could turn out to be a terrific language. Unfortunately, I don't see it happening. Arc is announcementware. It has shown no signs of life since its first few weeks. Com
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Don't tell me no one here has ever seen this. I can get my own copy there and print it. O'Reilly merely remade it, and gave a small credit to Eric Levenez.
--<Mike>--
Scheme is the dialect of Lisp currently best for such mathematical stuff. Lisp itself is a lot more procedural than most people think. It's a multi-paradigm language, you just have to think outside the box to get it. (It's funny - Lispniks have been thinking outside the box since before most people knew there was even a box to think outside of. :P)
OCCAM isn't mentioned (nor CSP from which it was derived). OCCAM was the parallel programming language of choice for the transputer back in the late 80s. While it was a little too PASCAL like it had some nice concepts borrowed from CSP. I'm surprised it didn't get a mention because at one time the transputer was the most advanced and innovative parallel processor around. But there again, both the transputer and OCCAM were British. Enough said.
Yes they did. Bright red block at the bottom with white letters. They give full credit.
Jilles
Pardon, Comrade? Obviously, you've forgotten to pick up those old books of yours and toss them down the memory hole. I am sure the Ministry of Love would be very interested to talk to you about your crackpot theories.
As you know, Big Bill himself created the first programming language. That was long after he created the first automobile and aeroplane. Why, every child know this to be true. Just look at your neighbour, Parsons' boy. His multimedia website in Flash tells him this is so.
Personally, I am looking forward to the Eleventh Edition of Windows. It's going to be the definitive one. The Eleventh Edition is going to be feature complete: There won't be one computer operation that isn't included in the operating system itself. Oh, what a glorious day this will be. It will be doubleplusgood.
I would love to stay and talk with you, but I really must hurry to my local Community Centre, or I will be late for the Two Minutes Hate. Oh that Richard Stallman's clever face, his venomous attacks on Microsoft. We must shout him down! We must not surrender!
Big Bill! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B!
It depends what you mean by "develop". If you mean, "ripped off public domain code for a BASIC interpreter" then you are quite correct it is a true statement.
I always find it ironic that Microsoft were one of the first companies to attach copyright notices to their software and yet, they owe their very existance to the public domain. If we introduce to the conversation, the charade of software-idea patents, we really begin to see how useful this "intellectual property" nonsense is to the software industry -- not at all; it serves only those who wish to make money and incarcerate the user.
Begone foul fascist programmers. We reject your proprietary code, for we no longer wish to be imprisoned in your capitalist catacombs. We are free men and women who deserve control of our lives and bow to no one but ourselves and our personal intellect.
Just in case you don't know, Lisp is a compiled language and not slow, especially when compiled with appropriate type declarations. Only the very most early dialects (forty or so years ago) were interpreted-only. Some interpreted implementations exist now, but that's a choice of the implementor, not a requirement of the language.
I disagree with your remarks about ugly and illegible, too, but that's personal taste, I guess. My views on all this are copiously documented in my Slashdot interview, Part I and Part II.
However, what really disappointed me in this chart was its unscientific and subjective decision about what to include and how to present things.
Some of the arrows stop mysteriously so far leftward (as if to hint "this language is no longer used). That's apparently a subjective assessment on their part offered with no foundation, and irresponsibly inappropriate in a document intended to fairly describe history. Common Lisp's arrow stops short for reasons I don't understand since it continues in commmercial use today.
I didn't check the table thoroughtly, but the absence of mention of the fact that Scheme influences Common Lisp seems odd since it's a well-advertised truth.
The omissions of ISLISP, an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 13816:1997) is also surprising and shows poor researching. The absence of Interlisp, Portable Standard Lisp (PSL), Eulisp, Gnu Emacs-Lisp (in spite of huge distribution world-wide as customization substrate for Emacs), and Xlisp (hugely distributed as part of Autocad) as important dialects is similarly sad.
O'Reilly sells books and has for a long time requested outright that no Lisp authors approach them. I and others have long noted that it has an apparent chip on its shoulder about Lisp, and little surprise they couldn't help exposing that bias in their chart. They want you to think the books they sell define the market. But that's just not so, especially when they voluntarily close their eyes to what's going on around them.
People should look skeptically at a company that wants a reputation as a "documentation" company yet so easily falls victim to its own commercial decision to close its eyes to this language family's achievements (such as an international standard).
A quick glance at other parts of the table leave out many other important languages and dialects, with no explanation of their rationale. Just for example: Teco, which strongly influenced Emacs-Lisp. I don't see HyperTalk there, either, even though I thought it influential. And there were many dialects of BASIC and LISP that are too small to mention, yet variations on the Unix shell language like bash are apparently worth mention. I guess that more reflects O'Reilly's sales than an attempt to explain history.
As a consequence, I have to regard this chart of theirs as commercial eye candy and not a properly scholarly work. I think it's a shame that Slashdot has chosen to give it all this free press. I'm sure that's just what they were hoping. And I'm sure they just don't care about their errors, omissions, and biases. I imagine they just want to sell books, and that all this free press will do just that.
Me, I buy my books from other sources. And I recommend you do, too.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
There are also a lot of languages that can be included, like Carl Hewitt's PLANNER (MIT's precursor to Prolog) and ACTORS (a purely message-passing object-oriented formalism that predated Smalltalk, and had several implementations and a lot of influence on other object-oriented languages).
All in all, I think both charts are pretty lame. O'Reilly should have at least solicited public comments before producing such a factually erroneous telling of history. This is altogether more surprising considering that O'Reilly is not a general publisher but instead specializes (in what they claim are) accurate technical manuscripts.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.