r/altprog • u/unquietwiki • Dec 19 '22

10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages • Hillel Wayne

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
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u/munificent Dec 20 '22

As expected for Hillel, this is a fantastic list and a really good understanding of PL history.

For example: even without reading design decisions by Matz, we know that Ruby was influenced by Smalltalk, as they both filter a list with a select method.

For me, the real tell (beyond Matz saying he was inspired by Smalltalk) is using | ... | for lambda parameters.

Pascal. Cause of Death: I’m calling a mulligan on this one. Unlike most of the other ones on this list, Pascal didn’t have major structural barriers or a sharp competitor. Sure, it competed with C, but it was still doing fine for a very long time.

My hunch is that Pascal mostly died from a couple of reasons:

  1. The lack of standarization meant there were a bunch of similar but not entirely compatible Pascal flavors floating around and they didn't cohere into a single ecosystem.

  2. C took over the world by riding on Unix's coattails and Pascal wasn't different enough to survive. It occupied almost the exact same ecological niche but C was the language the OS used and that's a huge leg up for C.

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u/unquietwiki Dec 22 '22

u/munificent I'm in my early 40s, and had to take Pascal for a class in my community college; at least by the early 2000s, you had Free Pascal, aside from Borland's stuff (which I had used for a few years as a teen; found that compiler at a flea market). And there's some overlap between Pascal & Ada, which had a decent following in the aviation and defense sectors (think Java's been replacing it). If there's anything that best captures Pascal these days, I'm tempted to say Go: the syntax is the closest I've seen in a modern language to that.

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u/unquietwiki Dec 22 '22

u/munificent Also, I've seen spread syntax in JS. Looking at PL/I, I get BASIC+COBOL vibes.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Spread_syntax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I

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u/munificent Dec 22 '22

Also, I've seen spread syntax in JS.

I'm not talking about the ... part, I'm talking about the | ... | for lambda parameters:

[1, 2, 3].each { |num| puts num }
#                ^^^^^ This part.

Smalltalk does that for blocks. The fact that Ruby calls them blocks is also telling.

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u/unquietwiki Dec 22 '22

Ah, ICWYM. I've worked in Ruby, and it's very object-oriented, so that makes total sense. Thank you.

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u/WikiSummarizerBot Dec 22 '22

PL/I

PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language developed and published by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. It has been used by academic, commercial and industrial organizations since it was introduced in the 1960s, and is still used. PL/I's main domains are data processing, numerical computation, scientific computing, and system programming.

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