On Saturday, April 08, 2023 09:55:14 AM Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Okay, can you boil it down to some one, two, maybe three main
> things that can answer the question why these languages have
> taken the different directions they have taken?
I think that in some | many cases, especially in the early days of
programming, languages were written based on what the language designer was
familiar with (and what he did or didn't like) about those languages.
Without having much familiarity with Perl, I might guess that Larry Wall was
familiar with things like awk, sed, bash and such, and wrote Perl to a certain
extent to combine what he considered the good features of those and fix what he
considered the bad features of those. In addition, I guess his general goal
was text processing.
My first language was Algol, a language that wrote out keywords and such so
that it was easier to understand (for me) what a given program was doing. It
was also structured (if that is the right word), having things like groups of
statements (within, iirc, begin / end statements) (something that, at the
time, iirc, Fortran (II) didn't have.
(Aside: pretty printing of code like that (if pretty printing was a thing at
that time, it is aggravating not remembering so many details) was (or could
be) accomplished partly by indenting blocks of code, hence I am rather
comfortable (or more than just comfortable) with Python's enforced
indentation).
Algol (and then Pascal and Python) were more general purpose languages,
capable of doing text processing, but maybe more then intent was (in my words)
numeric processing for scientific and mathmatical purposes.
Lisp: I guess I won't comment at this point in time -- when I was trying to
learn (people were trying to teach me) Lisp, it seemed the big emphasis was on
learning how to use , was it "cons" and something else to get the beginning or
remainder of a list -- it never (in the course I took) seemed to progress into
something that could really do what seemed to me at the time, useful things.
So, to repeat, probably without proving my point, I think many early languages
were designed based on what the designer new about other languages and what he
thought were good or bad features of those other languages.
There were (and are) maybe more speicalized languages, designed to be good for
a particular field of endeavor, and languages that incorporate new programming
features / paradigms that didn't exist when some languages were designed
(e.g., object oriented and functional programming (well, unless maybe Lisp is
considered and early example of functional programming).
For kicks, I will mention that I am experimenting with writing a program (a
lexer for Scintilla for a markup language that I use, partly of my own design)
using ChatGPT, and I'm impressed with the results. (I haven't yet compiled
any of the code to test it, but I hope to get there maybe sometime in June as
I expect to have more free time after April 18 (but probably won't have that
free time :-(
--
rhk
(sig revised 20230312 -- modified first paragraph, some other irrelevant
wordsmithing)
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If you change the topic, start a new thread.
Writing is often meant for others to read and understand (legal documents
excepted?) -- make it easier for your reader by various means, including
liberal use of whitespace (short paragraphs, separated by whitespace / blank
lines) and minimal use of (obscure?) jargon, abbreviations, acronyms, and
references.
If someone has already responded to a question, decide whether any response
you add will be helpful or not ...
A picture is worth a thousand words. A video (or "audio"): not so much --
divide by 10 for each minute of video (or audio) or create a transcript and
edit it to 10% of the original.
A speaker who uses ahhs, ums, or such may have a real physical or mental
disability, or may be showing disrespect for his listeners by not properly
preparing in advance and thinking before speaking. (That speaker might have
been "trained" to do this by being interrupted often if he pauses.) (Remember
Cicero who did not have enough time to write a short missive.)
A radio (or TV) station which broadcasts speakers with high pitched voices (or
very low pitched / gravelly voices) (which older people might not be able to
hear properly) disrespects its listeners. Likewise if it broadcasts
extraneous or disturbing sounds (like gunfire or crying), or broadcasts
speakers using their native language (with or without an overdubbed
translation).
A person who writes a sig this long probably has issues and disrespects (and
offends) a large number of readers. ;-)
'
