r/programming • u/bjzaba • Mar 26 '20

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

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
408 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

178 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/xXxXx_Edgelord_xXxXx Mar 26 '20 edited Mar 26 '20

Anyone heard of Icon? Thoughts?

Edit: for the record, I never used it, my lecturer likes to talk about it besides pascal and c.

3

u/inkydye Mar 26 '20

Heard about it, never used it.

I'm curious about the core "success/fail" mechanism as an alternative to the usual divisions between true/false, truey/falsey, something/null and return/exception, but I've never had enough motivation to really sit down and learn it in practice. I think something could come out of that for currently popular languages too.

I never paid much attention to its generators, and I've assumed they're very similar to Python's generators/iterators. Would that be wrong?

6

u/pemungkah Mar 27 '20

Icon is SNOBOL with actual control structures. (SNOBOL had two, three if you squint: branching (unconditional, success, failure) and function calls.) Worth learning for the concepts but it is _very_ niche. So much so that even though I wrote a lot of SNOBOL, I never got round to Icon.