

What are the best programming articles? - joel_liu

Sorry, the original URL is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/316461/what-are-the-best-programming-articles
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astrec
Pretty much anything on norvig.com and I'm also particularly fond of "The
Hundred Year Language" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html>)

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Kaizyn
You realize that at this point, the best candidate programming language for
100 year language is probably COBOL, followed after a good ways behind it by
C.

What about Lisp? I don't believe it's gaining new programmers at a fast enough
rate to be a sustainable community in the long term.

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gaius
FORTRAN too.

All the kids who might've gone into Lisp are going into Python instead and
asking the legitimate question, what can Lisp do that this can't? There's a
lot of hand-waving from the Lisp community about this and that, but a lack of
concrete example. On the academic high ground, there's Haskell and OCaml -
both communities are actively working on "batteries included" distributions to
bring their languages to the masses. The Lisp community took too much for
granted for too long, they have become overtaken by events on both sides. It's
not that Lisp will ever "die"... It'll just become irrelevant by the next
generation.

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astrec
I really don't see the flying cars of the future powered by either FORTRAN or
COBOL or even a descendent thereof - these are most likely not the hundred-
year language, although they'll probably still be processing pay packets for
Acme Corp another 100 years beyond that ;)

I see Py3k as proof positive that Guido et. al. intend to create something
enduring, and I'm also reasonably excited about F# and the ML family in
general. Clojure seems to have reinvigorated interest in Lisps also, but with
the benefit of one of the larger available libraries. Should be an interesting
decade in language development.

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gaius
I can guarantee that the CFD and FEA used to design said flying cars will be
done with FORTRAN.

