Programming Languages(increment.com)

40 pointsby crabasavor 8 Jahren19 comments

https://increment.com/programming-languages/

7 comments

dangvor 8 Jahren

It's not so great to submit lists of articles, such as the home page of a magazine issue, because then there isn't any content to sink teeth into. Such threads always boil down to lowest-common-denominator, i.e. generic, i.e. low-information discussions.

It's better to submit a specific article and then people can discuss what it says.

TimJYoungvor 8 Jahren

It's almost like Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and Object Pascal never existed, yet many applications were written (and are still written, in the case of Object Pascal) in all of them.

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.

crabasavor 8 Jahren

That was by far the weakest article.

My favorite was the Crash Course in Compilers:

https://increment.com/programming-languages/crash-course-in-...

ivanhoevor 8 Jahren

And not just that, but Delphi had tremendous influence on modern IDEs design.

gameswithgovor 8 Jahren

Delphi was one of the great programs of all time. It is possible that all tools to create graphical desktop applications since are a step backward.

crabasavor 8 Jahren

This comment got me Googling and I was amazed that I couldn't find a good, canonical list of programming languages.

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?

figgisvor 8 Jahren

Wikipedia has other lists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_programming_languages

crabasavor 8 Jahren

This is where I think Wikipedia really falls down as a repository of information. It's crazy that if a new programming language is invented, people would have update N Wikipedia pages.

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?

sjakobivor 8 Jahren

In the article about non-Turing-complete languages, I kind of expected to find a mention of Dhall which is a fancy new programmable configuration language:

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang

exitcode__0vor 8 Jahren

Doesn't even mention Ada...

bgormanvor 8 Jahren

"Six questions on programming languages" - Which programming languages do you use?

Not a single functional or declarative language. What a waste of an article.

dangvor 8 Jahren

Maybe so, but please don't post shallow dismissals to HN. Even if they're right, they damage the container here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Avshalomvor 8 Jahren

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Remains the best and most accurate article on programming languages available.

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

alexashkavor 8 Jahren

I think it's great to have an internet magazine of sorts - I do question the approach.

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.

sagichmalvor 8 Jahren

The articles are all on the subject of programming languages.

If your complaint is that they are not sufficiently about programming languages, well. That seems wildly petty.

alexashkavor 8 Jahren

Right, let me give you a comparison of the approach this magazine has taken, and another place I consider pretty good: Wikipedia.

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.

neurotracevor 8 Jahren

Sometimes it's nice to get information as written by another person. Maybe the author didn't like the way Wikipedia presented the information, maybe they thought it was overly verbose, maybe they just wanted to warm people into the idea of programming languages before getting into the other articles. We're people, not robots. Expression through writing, even if it is "re-inventing" existing information, is not a bad thing. Not to mention, they had an entire article dedicated to the personal opinions of various people in the industry and how the languages they use affect their businesses. That's not something you should expect to get from Wikipedia.

majewskyvor 8 Jahren

> it's filled with people re-inventing things that need not be re-invented

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.

alexashkavor 8 Jahren

Well, I am hopeful that it is at least in some cases, simply ignorance.

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 :)