
Timeline of programming languages - geospeck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languages
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b0rsuk
Anyone brave enough to bet which ones are going to turn out big ?

Swift has a big potential in the sense that it's backed by Apple, and looks
like Objective C reimagined for Apple's purposes.

Rust has Mozilla backing, and it's already popular around here, so I won't
elaborate.

Extra points for naming languages which will succeed despite not being
initially corporation-backed.

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jdonaldson
Swift will rise and fall with iOs. Rust will gradually eat Unix tooling, and
supplant C.

WebAssembly will be really interesting. It could finally be the tech layer
that replaces the JVM. I'm not sure what the winning language will be though.

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sytse
Interesting that PHP, Ruby, and Javascript were all created in 1995.

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brazzy
Java as well (public alpha release).

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galfarragem
If a fellow wikipedia editor is reading: some recent languages like Pony,
Purescript and Reason are still missing.

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bachmeier
It's also missing a lot of details that should be added from [http://james-
iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...](http://james-
iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html)

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bdcravens
Always a fun discussion when someone calls a language old. "ColdFusion? That
old language? You should use Javascript or Ruby or Python and get with the
times!"

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stunpix
Only 17 new languages in last decade? Why such dramatic slowdown in contrast
with earlier decades?

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munificent
Honest but cynical answer: deletionist Wikipedia editors rained down the
delete hammer on most new languages a while back. They now have very high
requirements for notability, so unless a language is old enough to be
mentioned in print sources (which are increasingly not relevant to the
advancement of human knowledge), then it's unlikely to have its own page on
Wikipedia.

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ghaff
In all fairness, although I'm pretty much solidly in the inclusionist camp,
lists like this on Wikipedia can turn into this vast laundry list of
everyone's pet hobby project or master's thesis. You could probably delete 75%
of that list and not remove anything that was commercially important or
historically significant.

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d33
I guess that one could solve this by making Wikipedia more semantic-driven:
imagine being able to filter through the laundry list by measuring relevance
using Github statistics (is it still maintained? was it starred by more than
100 people?) - you could have a lot information and still be able to digest it
by prioritization. What do you think?

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ghaff
That's just one example. There are all sorts of lists like "Notable people
from X city" that get pretty ridiculous.

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d33
One could add queryable criteria there as well.

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lynchblue
Didn't know that python was actually older than java

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k__
Interesting. I had the impression ML was older :)

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willtim
ML first appeared in 1973. Pretty impressive considering the laundry list of
features, many of which are missing from mainstream industrial languages. For
example: parametric polymorphism (aka "generics"), pattern-matching and type
inference.

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k__
lol, I hate the words "parametric polymorphism" had it as a question in an
university exam and failed, because I only learned "generics" and "templates"
xD

love the concept tho

~~~
willtim
The problem with the word "generics" is that it already meant something else
in programming language theory. If I used reflection to implement a
serialisation function in Java or C#, it could be generic with respect to the
data-type of the value passed in, but not parametric. A parametric polymorphic
function strictly has the same behaviour for all types, a generic one has
type-dependent behaviour. This matters of course when we want to reason about
programs.

