
Programming Languages - crabasa
https://increment.com/programming-languages/
======
dang
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.

------
TimJYoung
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.

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

~~~
gameswithgo
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.

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sjakobi
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](https://github.com/dhall-
lang/dhall-lang)

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exitcode__0
Doesn't even mention Ada...

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

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

~~~
dang
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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Avshalom
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-...](https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-
wrong.html?m=1)

------
alexashka
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.

~~~
sagichmal
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.

~~~
alexashka
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://increment.com/programming-languages/language-history/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages)

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.

~~~
majewsky
> 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.

~~~
alexashka
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 :)

