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Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)

The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of what “significant in history” means. So let’s talk about some “mostly dead” languages and why they matter so much. Disclaimer: Yeah not all of these are dead and not all of these a

Most (ly Dead) Influential Programming Languages (2020)

The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of what “significant in history” means. So let’s talk about some “mostly dead” languages and why they matter so much. Disclaimer: Yeah not all of these are dead and not all of these a

You Are in a Box

This post is part 1 of a multi-part series called “the computer of the next 200 years”. You are trapped in a box. You have been for a long time. —D. R. MacIver Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. —Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment switching costs and growth most tools simultaneously think too small and too big. “i will let you do anything!”, they promise, “as long as you give up your other tools

Chasing Lost Languages

If humans have been talking for 200,000 years—for most of our species’ existence, that is—then an estimated half a million languages might have been spoken in all. To put that number in perspective, around 7,000 languages are spoken today. And because writing was only invented about 5,000 years ago, the vast majority of those half a million languages are lost to us, having been spoken in a preliterate world and died before they could be recorded. That’s half a million distinct systems of knowled

LLMs Bring New Nature of Abstraction

Like most loudmouths in this field, I've been paying a lot of attention to the role that generative AI systems may play in software development. I think the appearance of LLMs will change software development to a similar degree as the change from assembler to the first high-level programming languages. The further development of languages and frameworks increased our abstraction level and productivity, but didn't have that kind of impact on the nature of programming. LLMs are making that degree

LLMs bring new nature of abstraction – up and sideways

Like most loudmouths in this field, I've been paying a lot of attention to the role that generative AI systems may play in software development. I think the appearance of LLMs will change software development to a similar degree as the change from assembler to the first high-level programming languages. The further development of languages and frameworks increased our abstraction level and productivity, but didn't have that kind of impact on the nature of programming. LLMs are making that degree

How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! [video] (2021)

InfoQ Homepage Presentations How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! Like Reading list View Presentation Vertical Horizontal Full Speed: 1x 1.25x 1.5x 2x Download MP3 Slides 01:09:36 Summary Guy L. Steele Jr. believes that it should not be the programmer’s job to think about parallelism, but languages should provide ways to transparently run tasks in parallel. This requires a new approach in building languages supporting algorithms b

What is systems programming, really? (2018)

$$ % Typography and symbols ewcommand{\msf}[1]{\mathsf{#1}} ewcommand{\ctx}{\Gamma} ewcommand{\qamp}{&\quad} ewcommand{\qqamp}{&&\quad} ewcommand{\Coloneqq}{::=} ewcommand{\proves}{\vdash} ewcommand{\star}[1]{#1^{*}} ewcommand{\eps}{\varepsilon} ewcommand{ ul}{\varnothing} ewcommand{\brc}[1]{\{{#1}\}} ewcommand{\binopm}[2]{#1~\bar{\oplus}~#2} ewcommand{\mag}[1]{|{#1}|} ewcommand{\aequiv}{\equiv_\alpha} ewcommand{\semi}[2]{{#1};~{#2}} % Untyped lambda calculus ewcommand{\fun}[2]{\

Subtype Inference by Example

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in tools and programming languages that can automatically detect common types of bugs, in order to improve product quality and programmer productivity. Most commonly, this is done via static type systems, but traditional static type systems require large amounts of manual annotation by programmers, making them difficult to work with. Therefore, modern programming languages make increasing use of type inference, which provides the same benefits

Mistral's new AI model specializes in Arabic and related languages

chrispecoraro/Getty Images Paris-based AI startup Mistral is focusing on providing large language models (LLMs) that understand regional-specific languages and are tailored to grasp the cultural nuances sometimes overlooked in larger, more general-purpose models trained to be versed in multiple languages. Mistral has released its first "specialized" regional language-focused model, Saba. According to Mistral, the 24-billion-parameter model has been trained on "meticulously curated datasets" fr