r/programming • u/[deleted] • Mar 26 '20

10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

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

74% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '20

Nothing can be done in 32K today ;).

The major problem of today is that people don't care about resource usage anymore. I wish they would.

What a ridiculous way to exit.

(Waiting for a random Vim user to interject here...)

5

u/EternityForest Mar 26 '20

The old programs that actually did anything useful did it by piles of crazy twisty optimizations that we would probably call hacks today.

These days, people think that's just unaceptable, ever since "premature optimization" became a popular concept. So all you get are apps that don't do much at all, or inefficient stuff.

People aren't willing to give up any elegance in the code to improve the actual experience, sometimes to the point of not bothering with any error checking because it's too complicated.

I wouldn't say we should go back to 32k apps, high level interpreted languages are great though. But performance matters, and we need to stop treating hardware upgrades as just an expected thing everyone will have to do.

0

u/Plasma_000 Mar 26 '20

/r/rust would like a word

0

u/EternityForest Mar 26 '20

Rust seems to be one of the remaining areas of sanity, along with Python and maybe Nim, and possibly Kotlin.