

Ground Breaking Languages - groovy2shoes
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?GroundBreakingLanguages

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masklinn
I don't understand what Java is doing in the list of "ground breaking
languages" rather than on the one below, most of the claims are demonstrably
(and demonstrated, by comments) wrong and little to nothing about java broke
any new ground (unless a language becoming prominent through marketing and its
ability to power corporate code monkeys is considered ground-breaking).

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jng
Jon McCarthy's Elephant seems to be missing from the list.

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jastanton_
I don't see PHP on there...

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mdaniel
I did see your followup that you were just razzing folks, but I thought about
whether I would include PHP in that list and I think the answer is yes, with a
Barry Bonds-esque asterisk.

I actually think that PHP, like Basic, was simple enough for the Everyone to
grasp, and came with a good-enough standard library (always important). But I
think what made it the swiss-army knife of web developers is that it was
deployed _everywhere_.

One cannot login to [hosting provider du jour] and run Lisp, and let's not
even discuss the devops horrors of trying to get a JVM to run on a server, let
alone one shared by 50 of your closest friends. But you can edit index.php in
notepad, ftp it to your hosting provider, and voilà: you have created your
first dynamic content on the web.

I thought perhaps there might be some chicken-and-egg at work here, that if
Wordpress had been written in Python (for example) that shared Python installs
would be the default. But I realized that Python is a software engineering
language. It has structure and _enforces_ its use. But PHP allows, for good or
bad, one to use whatever kind of crazy syntax style they like, in just about
any filename they want, and it's likely still going to parse. In that way, it
is very Perlish. But unlike Perl, normal folks can read it, which fosters a
copy-paste-and-improve development cycle.

I do not, in any seriousness, understand why Facebook uses PHP; hell, uses?
Built a damn _compiler_ for it. But if I recall correctly, the answer at the
time was "it works for us," which is all the justification that the outside
world needs, I guess.

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Androsynth
Just because you don't like the language doesn't mean its not important. It
has been the gateway programming language for the web. Sure, experienced devs
move over to python or ruby, but that doesn't make php any less _important_.

edit: seriously, its groundbreaking in the fact that it made dynamic website
development accessible to everyone! That easily makes it more groundbreaking
than half the languages on the list.

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batista
I don't understand what people are doing in the list of HN comments on this
thread.

The comments I've read so far surely do not belong in an intelligent
discussion. My favorite comment, however, does.

/s

Yes, I copied the form of 90% of the comments here ironically.

People, it's not a definite list to be revered for all eternity. It's a
fucking WIKI. Languages get moved up or down. You can probably go in and edit
them yourself. See it as a starting point, and don't expect it to be 100%
correct (which is not even possible).

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sgonyea
That list is pretty silly. Perl belongs there, but Python does not (neither
does Ruby, though it wasn't listed).

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mattbriggs
Perl and Python are both in the "pending someone mentioning something they did
that noone else has done before" part of the page, they aren't considered part
of the list.

