Programming Languages

https://increment.com/programming-languages/

by crabasa • 8 years ago

40 19 8 years ago

TimJYoung• 8 years ago

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.

crabasa3• 8 years ago

That was by far the weakest article.

My favorite was the Crash Course in Compilers:

https://increment.com/programming-languages/crash-course-in-...

ivanhoe• 8 years ago

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

gameswithgo• 8 years ago

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.

crabasa3• 8 years ago

This comment got me Googling and I was amazed that I couldn't find a good, canonical list of programming languages.

The best I could find was a Wikipedia page, they're sorted by alpha which I find not very useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

Does anyone know of a better resource?

figgis• 8 years ago

Wikipedia has other lists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_programming_languages

alexashka3• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

alexashka3• 8 years ago

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...

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.

exitcode__0• 8 years ago

Doesn't even mention Ada...

Avshalom• 8 years ago

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-...

bgorman• 8 years ago

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

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

dang2• 8 years ago

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

dang2• 8 years ago

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.

sjakobi• 8 years ago

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

Programming Languages

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