A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)

http://james-iry.blogspot.de/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html?m=1

by jownwayne • 12 years ago

37 13 12 years ago

james-iry.blogspot.de

ColinWright3• 12 years ago

In case you're wondering why this obviously brilliant article doesn't get much discussion, or many votes, some people here have seen it before. Here are some of the previous submissions:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=brief+incomplete#!/story/forever/p...

Of course, it may again get lots of discussion and lots of up-votes. We'll see.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7263243

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149634

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6953863

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504217

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234361

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804668

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728844

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728843

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377944

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129062

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586462

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507566

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1475826

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327746

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1310127

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164

danso2• 12 years ago

God DAMN you put more work into meta-summary than most of us put into actual comments ;)

I know there's been talk about it, but has anyone hacked together a quickie-scraper tool or mini-app that would, given a HN submission, find similar submissions, and generate a plaintext list like the parent comment, but maybe with some metadata (such as date of submission, number of comments, number of upvotes). I'll put that on my side projects list but I bet someone more OCD than me has already done something like this.

ColinWright3• 12 years ago

I have a bunch of half-finished, partially working, user-hostile tools. I can't bundle or release them, it would take too long to write what they do, and don't do. I could do something like you say, but again, as you say, I'd bet someone else has already mostly done it.

I wonder if I could cobble together from what I have something that I could make public. Next time I cross-reference stuff I'll leave a trail of bread-crumbs to see if I can regularize/semi-automate it.

notduncansmith• 12 years ago

The search box at the bottom of the page does a pretty good job, given a title :)

Depends on what you mean by "similar submissions", though. Similar titles (similar in topic? Sentiment? Levenshtein distance?), identical links, similar linked content (similar how?), etc.

pronoiac2• 12 years ago

If memory serves, someone built this with a semi-automated account, he got some (to him) surprisingly heated criticism from the community, and he stopped.

agarcia-deniz• 12 years ago

saved me the work of pointing out that this really good post has been submitted before many a times :)

nightpool• 12 years ago

My favorite is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728843 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728844, where two people post the exact same article within presumably minutes of each other, and manage to achieve sequential ids.

danso2• 12 years ago

OK, I was bored...made a tool that produces even more messier output :) At least I got to try out the HN API

https://github.com/dannguyen/hn_dupesum

============================

Stories containing the title of "a brief history of programming" received:

At least 20 submissions from 2008-05-18 to 2014-05-25, i.e. ~109 days between each submission

- At least 1338 points, i.e. ~66.9 points per submission

- At least 176 comments, i.e. ~8.8 comments per submission

============================

Submission #1 by DanielRibeiro: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896

2012-01-24 (~852 days ago) 389 points and 45 comments

Top comments:

- bitops [27 points]: Only two minor quibbles: 1) did not mention Clojure. 2) broke the amusing narrative a bit in the middle by including a true story (Perl). Really funny otherwise. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504001]

- f4stjack [26 points]: "1996 - James Gosling invents Java. Java is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Sun loudly heralds Java's novelty. 2001 - Anders Hejlsberg invents C#. C# is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. ... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503969]

- perfunctory [24 points]: My favourite is actually: 1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504067]

Submission #2 by toddc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164

2009-05-08 (~1844 days ago) 299 points and 14 comments

Top comments:

- tumult [52 points]: Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them. Alright, this was surprisingly amusing. Thanks. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599281]

- jfarmer [33 points]: My favorite:\n1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599308]

- visitor4rmindia [17 points]: Oh my God! That was the best belly laugh I've had in a long time. Very fun read. > 1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later stil, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599345]

Submission #3 by ldubinets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816

2013-05-12 (~378 days ago) 209 points and 33 comments

Top comments:

- ldubinets [26 points]: It took me a couple minutes too... The first comment sorts it out though. Turns out that Jacquard's loom was multi-threaded after all. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5697144]

- mercuryrising [17 points]: I like this. I like this a lot. I think far too often people take the concepts we study too seriously. Things get challenging, things get precise, but the moment the humor leaves, the creativity is gone. Think of how easy it would be to learn something if you make a joke every 5 minutes while learning it (about the subject). In your mind, you turned this abstract concept into something else, something funny, something with pathways and connections that weren't expected. You manipulated it, chan... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696773]

- Symmetry [17 points]: Reminds me of C being described as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language". [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696368]

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slashnull• 12 years ago

Other well known languages in the ML family include OCaml, F#, and Visual Basic.

Every. Single. Time.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)

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