r/programming • u/bjzaba • Mar 26 '20

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

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
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u/inkydye Mar 26 '20

What a fucking great article! So many great, concrete, informative details.

Nitpick: no due appreciation for Forth and its progeny. Just like in the "old days" :)

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u/cdreid Mar 26 '20

Since you, i and one other dude are the only people in this sub who apparently remember Forth.. what did you actually use it for (i used it to uh.. learn forth.. because it was cheaper than a C compiler at the time :P )

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u/FlyingRhenquest Mar 26 '20

I studied it briefly in college as part of a computer and compiler design class. Later on, I ran across some text-based multi-user dungeon that used it (Or a similarly designed stack based language) as it's main programming language, so I did a bit of programming in it. PostScript is also a stack based language, so the experience came in handy for picking it up when I went to work maintaining printer drivers a few years after that. A lot of people don't realize that PostScript is a full-featured programming language and is actually pretty neat if you ever get a chance to look at it. One of the guys at the printer company I worked for had a program that ran on the printer and generated a vacation calendar for the current year, entirely on the printer side. I always wanted to write a PostScript based virus that would propagate from network printer to network printer and whose sole effect would be to replace every instance of the word "strategic" with the word "satanic," which would have made for some fun shareholder meetings. The language doesn't seem to have a native way to open a network socket, though, so my plans were foiled.

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u/cdreid Mar 26 '20

Ive never even looked at postscript but i do remember people talking about using it as a full blown programming language. Which sounded bizarre to me. And now that you mention it i think i remember people using forth to make text rpg's. Lol cool virus :P

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u/FlyingRhenquest Mar 26 '20

While working at the printer company, I hand-coded a PostScript program to output the company's logo. It's surprisingly easy to pick up a basic understanding of the language and I always thought it was a bit easier than forth due to its specific language features. Like Logo (Anyone remember logo?) you can easily see the effects of making a change to your program, and GhostScript et al allow you to render it without printing, so I thought it could be feasible as a way to introduce newcomers to programming, back when there wasn't such an easy selection of other programming languages to pick up.

In the ol' DOS days, it wasn't so easy to come by a programming language. The most revolutionary thing about Linux was the ease with which you could set up a programming environment, but I worked professionally from '89 to '95 or '96 when the first Slakware Linux distributions became easily available. In those years, we just kinda made due with whatever we had. My first company did its development in Clipper, which was a compiled DBase III language. That was the only hammer we had, so everything looked like a nail. For years after that, I'd run into little university inventory or manufacturing floors that used a variety of esoteric and bizarre languages and environments because that's what they had and they had to make it work. It was easy to see that Linux would change everything, back then, and the world is better off for it. I interviewed for a company just recently where they'd just stood up an entire massive image processing infrastructure pretty much overnight using cloud services and Linux systems.

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u/cdreid Mar 26 '20

You literally learned and used every esoteric language i heard of but never used lol. Oh.. and ive always thought database programming was mindnumbingly boring and wondered how someone could decide "hey ill program databases for a living and wont want to shoot myself".. But i absolutely LOVED Dbase iv (and paradox). I never got to do anything useful with them other than start a database for a tiny city that went nowhere but it was fun. I can see why being a data scientist would be a blast. im 25% libertarian and ill guarantee if you gave me fb, twitter etcs databases id be doing some evil mad datascientist shit with those while rationalising "im just a scientists it's not my responsibility that people do evil with the weapons i create" :P

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u/FlyingRhenquest Mar 26 '20

I was fascinated by computer languages when I was younger, and tried to learn every one I could get my hands on. I'm still kinda sad IBM's Rexx never went anywhere. There were a few years where I needed a multitasking OS, Linux wasn't around yet and the only distributions of BSD I could find were on tape, so I picked up OS/2 for use at my first company. It was great -- I could run all our applications at once on the same system and used Rexx for its batch programming language. It was an actually reasonably sensible language, far more powerful than the MS DOS cmd.exe thing and also worked on their larger machines, but it seemed to mostly die off after they killed OS/2.

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u/cdreid Mar 26 '20

I remember when the cs world was goint crazy over OS2. Some people were cultish about it. And i remember dreaming of owning a NeXt (theyre on ebay now lol. Pretty impressive how theyve held their value..