

Someone at Wired.com just found pg's "The Hundred Year Language". - zck
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/06/dead-media-beat-evolution-of-computer-languages/

======
wooby
I ran into a paper called "The Next 700 Languages" while doing Scala research.
The paper, written in 1966, is lengthy but awesome. Its conclusion reminded me
a lot of PGs paper, which I hadn't read:

The languages people use to communicate with computers differ in their
intended aptitudes, towards either a particular application area, or a
particular phase of computer use (high level programming, program assembly,
job scheduling, etc). They also differ in physical appearance, and more
important, in logical structure. The question arises, do the idiosyncracies
reflect basic logical properties of the situations that are being catered for?
Or are they accidents of history and personal background that may be obscuring
fruitful developments? This question is clearly important if we are trying to
predict or influence language evolution.

To answer it we must think in terms, not of languages, but of families of
languages. That is to say we must systematize their design so that a new
language is a point chosen from a well-mapped space, rather than a laboriously
devised construction.

PDF:
[http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~blume/classes/aut2008/proglang/pap...](http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~blume/classes/aut2008/proglang/papers/Landin-
next-700.pdf)

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SwellJoe
Where "Someone"=="Bruce Sterling"

And it also happens to be an interesting response to pg's essay, as it brings
up the question of the "main branch" of evolution in programming languages,
which, in choosing Lisp as the basis for his own 100 year language, pg
seemingly ignores.

~~~
zck
Does it actually bring up any points? The only added text I saw were three
jokes that didn't add anything to the essay.

~~~
SwellJoe
Actually, you're quite right. I guess it's been too long since I've read pg's
essay. I thought this was a response, rather than a re-post. So, that makes me
wonder whether pg thinks Lisp is on a main branch...

~~~
zck
That was one of the reasons I posted this link -- it adds nothing of value to
pg's essay, and quotes a whole lot of it; I think bordering on plagarism.

~~~
misuba
This is Sterling's basic mode of blogging: the original, plus commentary.
Granted, usually it's a lot more commentary.

A lot of people lately are being prodigal with the P word (the other P word, I
mean: "plagiarism") in referring to blogs that quote at length. The blogs in
question almost always make it clear that the quote is a quote. Sterling is
less good at this, but his regular readers have no trouble and PageRank is not
his goal. Can we please reserve our ire for the real plagiarists, which are
plentiful?

~~~
zck
I looked over Sterling's other posts before submitting a "this guy's stealing
from pg" post, and came to a similar conclusion. I thought about it, and came
to the conclusion that I don't like it, but it wasn't worth raising the alarm
over. I still think this is a Bad Thing to do. His post didn't quote the whole
thing, and links to the source, which are good. However, here are some of the
things that bother me: He doesn't make it obvious that it is a quote -- the
link doesn't have any helpful text; it's just a link. It doesn't say "from
pg". He adds nothing of value. (This is arguably similar to reddit,
boingboing, or, indeed, hacker news itself, but differs in that on those sites
either a very small amount is quoted, or the quoting is obvious (see
boingboing's quotes)).

So you're right -- this isn't plagarism, but I still think it's unethical,
especially for someone at Wired.

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russell
It started off pretty well, but then didnt go anywhere.

I dont think any of our languages are hundred year languages, although COBOL
and FORTRAN are in their early fifties. Mostly they wont survive because they
arent concise enough to express our ideas in a hundred years. List
comprehension in Python is way more concise than the same operation in C or
assembly language. Why should we worry about the bookkeeping details of a
container in 2100. But we wont be doing programming then. Our AIs will. I aim
to be a philosopher of computation by then. I'll tell the AIs old war stories.

~~~
randallsquared
_I aim to be a philosopher of computation by then._

Philosophy is what you do when you don't really understand the details. Maybe
that's exactly what you meant, though, come to think of it. :)

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zandorg
I think Bruce Sterling with those silly jokes just proves he hasn't written
anything good since 1988.

