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Programming language development: the past 5 years (2011)

blog.fogus.me

57 points by alvin0 10 years ago · 27 comments

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vvanders 10 years ago

Kinda sad to see the perpetuation of Go as a "systems-level" programming language. Services-level? Sure.

However, until I can manually control memory it's not going to be a low level language I want to use.

  • dikaiosune 10 years ago

    It's how Go was presenting itself in 2011, IIRC. Not so much anymore.

  • pjmlp 10 years ago

    It is as much system level as Oberon or Mesa/Cedar, both with proofs on how to write a full graphic Workstation with them.

    As for Go, it is fully bootstraped in itself, including the whole runtime.

    There are already some bare bones examples at OS Dev

    http://wiki.osdev.org/Go_Bare_Bones

    And there are people writing bare metal runtimes for the STM32F4 and STM32L1-Discovery boards.

    https://sites.google.com/site/embeddedgo/home

    For me that is a system level programming language.

    • vvanders 10 years ago

      I can run Javascript on an Arduino does that make it a systems level programming language?

      There's so many things missing from Go, from volatile semantics to memory control(good luck getting memory banks on PIC working).

      Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a good fit.

      • pjmlp 10 years ago

        > I can run Javascript on an Arduino does that make it a systems level programming language?

        Johnny-Five? It isn't running on the Arduino.

        A systems programming language is one that is possible to write the whole stack all the way from the boot loader, with a very tiny help from Assembly in the process, like bootloader, interrupt handling, DMA.

        The day I am able to write a JavaScript AOT and JIT, in JavaScript, maybe.

        As for volatile semantics, many system programming languages in the early days didn't had them as well.

        PIC, well. How would you make PIC banks work in a standards compliant ANSI C compiler without language extensions?

        With Assembly of course, so can Go.

        Also nothing prevents a Go compiler to provide extensions just like what many think of C features for systems programming are actually not part of ANSI C.

        Go already has "pragmas" in the form of //go:...... And nothing prevents a Go compliant compiler to provide more.

        The code for Xerox Star, ETHZ Oberon, ETHZ EthOs, ETHZ AOS are available for anyone that cares to read them and how it is possible to write a full stack workstation.

        Or better yet, getting the 2013 edition of Project Oberon book and building the whole computer, including the motherboard.

  • tracker1 10 years ago

    I think the meaning was software systems and services, not Operating Systems... though it's always bugged me as well.

virtuexru 10 years ago

Interesting; I've never heard of most of those besides Go (& Perl of course). Is CoffeeScript considered a programming language? :O

  • danso 10 years ago

    FWIW, the first submitter of this post seems to be Jeremy Ashkenas, who was the creator of CoffeeScript:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128166

    Even if you're being half-facetious...while CoffeeScript seems to have fallen in favor with the onset of ES6, it's hard to overstate its influence in 2011...Rails, which was most definitely the hott framework du jour, decided to make CoffeeScript -- along with the much more ubiquitous jQuery and SASS -- part of its default stack: http://www.rubyinside.com/rails-3-1-adopts-coffeescript-jque...

    • alvin0OP 10 years ago

      Is there a way to mark duplicates? I did a preliminary search for this topic via google before the post and this previous one hadn't turned up.

  • codemonkeymike 10 years ago

    It may be because in the past 5 years from today most of these languages have seized development. It is still interesting to see which of the "New Hotness" languages of 2011 are still around and strong. Like Clojure and Go

    • stcredzero 10 years ago

      Years ago, Rob Pike and Rich Hickey seized the development day. Their languages have not ceased development.

  • busterarm 10 years ago

    The site we're on is running on Arc.

    Notice the mention of Dart and Rust as up-and-comers.

  • DanWaterworth 10 years ago

    > Is CoffeeScript considered a programming language? :O

    No, technically it's a type of vegetable.

kovrik 10 years ago

I find Shen lang interesting, but never actually tried it. Can anyone explain few things?

1. Why explicitly call `prolog?` function? Why not make it implicit, so user could use, for example, `member` function (defined via `defprolog` notation) as a normal function?

2. Automatic partial application. I see that example was simplified, but then how it looks in reality? Because I find (* 2) returning `lambda`, instead of 2 confusing.

swah 10 years ago

I vividly remember being very excited and optimist about (web?) programming and our community when _why appeared with his posts about Ruby.

Its probably related to my age as well, but I haven't felt that way again for a long time now.

kristianp 10 years ago

Re: the Ometa language, a sequel that is hosted on Javascript is Ohm: https://github.com/cdglabs/ohm

rurban 10 years ago

Nowadays this list should include pony, wren, vio, Luna, nim, ...

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