Discussion
madhadron
macintux: Reminds me a bit of Bruce Tate’s approach in 7 languages in 7 weeks, which is where I first encountered Erlang.I think from a historical perspective, describing COBOL and Fortran as part of the ALGOL family is a stretch, but I suppose it’s a good reminder that all history is reductive.
tagfowufe: I would refer to the world _cognate_[0]. 'Fundamental programming cognates' sounds cool as a uni course.[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cognate
mellosouls: (2022) and unfortunately advice to spend significant amounts of time in learning multiple languages is becoming rapidly redundant in the LLM age.
anthk: - Algol 68 docs: https://algol68-lang.org/resources 'a68g' it's a free as in freedom compiler.- Forth: you can use PFE,Gforth for ANS Forth requeriments. Or EForth if you reached high skills levels where the missing stuff can be just reimplemented.EForth under Muxleq: https://github.com/howerj/muxleq I can provide a working config where a 90% of it would be valid across SF.Starting Forth, ANS version: https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/Thinking Forth, do this after finishing SF: https://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/Also, Forth Scientific Library. You can make it working with both GForth and PFE, just read the docs.Full pack: https://www.taygeta.com/fsl/library/Library.tgzHelping Forth code for GForth/PFE. If you put it under scilib/fs-util.fs, load it with: s" scilib/fsu-util.fs" included https://www.taygeta.com/fsl/library/fsl-util.fs- Lisp. s9fes, it will compile under any nix/Mac/BSD out there, even with MinC.S9fes: http://www.t3x.org/s9fes/Pick the bleeding edge version, it will compile just fine.For Windows users: MinC, install both EXE under Windows. First, mincexe, then buildtools*exe: https://minc.commandlinerevolution.nl/english/home.htmlThen get 7zip to decompress the s9fes TGZ file, cd to that directory, and run 'make'.Run ./s9 to get the prompt, or ./s9 file.scm where file.scm it's the source code.In order to learn Scheme, there's are two newbie recommended books before "SICP".Pick any, CACS, SS, it doesn't matter, both will guide you before SICP, the 'big' book on Scheme:Simply Scheme https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/pdf/Concrete AbstractionsBook:https://www.d.umn.edu/~tcolburn/cs1581/ConcreteAbstractions....The SCM files needed to be (load "foo.scm") ed in the code in order to do the exercises:https://github.com/freezoo/scheme-concabsIf you are en Emacs user, just read the Elisp intro, it will work for a different Lisp family but with similar design.Spot the differences:Scheme (like s9): (define (square x) (\* x x)) Elisp/Common Lisp (as the web site shows): (defun square (x) (\* x x)) - Ok, ML like languages:https://www.t3x.org/mlite/index.htmlIf you follow the instructions on compiling s9, mlite it's similar with MinC for Windows. If you are a Unix/Linux/Mac user, you already know how to do that.You got the whole docs in the TGZ file, and the web.
tmtvl: For Lisp one could also start with Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (<https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf>) and follow it with SBCL.
anthk: Yep, and after that I'd jump into PAIP, Paradigms of AI Programming.Code: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lispThe EPUB looks broken in my machine, try the PDF: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Norvig._Paradi...Altough Scheme and CL are different paths. CL's loop it's really, really complex and Scheme it's pretty much straightforward to understand. Any advanced CL user will have to implement Scheme's syntax (and an interpreter) as an exercise for PAIP. CL in CL... well, CL is too huge, T3X tried with Kilo Lisp 23 http://t3x.org/klisp/22/index.html and I doubt if anyone can even complete anything but the few starting chapters from Intro to Common Lisp with it.
gottheUIblues: Rather COBOL is a living fossil? And today's Fortran is the FORTRAN family with horizontal gene transfer from the Algol lineage of programming languages.
shevy-java: Can COBOL be called a living fossil?I mean, programming languages do not live; and they do not "die", per se, either. Just the usage may go down towards 0.COBOL would then be close to extinction. I think it only has a few niche places in the USA and perhaps a very few more areas, but I don't think it will survive for many more decades to come, whereas I think C or python will be around in, say, three decades still.> family with horizontal gene transferWell, you refer here to biology; viruses are the most famous for horizontal gene transfer, transposons and plasmids too. But I don't think these terms apply to software that well. Code does not magically "transfer" and work, often you have to adjust to a particular architecture - that was one key reason why C became so dynamic. In biology you basically just have DNA, if we ignore RNA viruses (but they all need a cell for their own propagation) 4 states per slot in dsDNA (A, T, C, G; here I exclude RNA, but RNA is in many ways just like DNA, see reverse transcriptase, also found in viruses). So you don't have to translate much at all; some organisms use different codons (mitochondrial DNA has a few different codon tables) but by and large what works in organism A, works in organism B too, if you just look to, say, wish to create a protein. That's why "genetic engineering" is so simple, in principle: it just works if you put genes into different organisms (again, some details may be different but e. g. UUU would could for phenylalanine in most organisms; UUU is the mRNA variant of course, in dsDNA it would be TTT). Also, there is little to no "planning" when horizontal gene transfer happens, whereas porting requires thinking by a human. I don't feel that analogy works well at all.
zoky: [delayed]
justincormack: These are tools for thinking with, so not obsolete.
pfdietz: I might add another class of languages: those intended to express proofs, via the Curry-Howard correspondence. Lean is the primary example here. This could be considered a subclass of functional languages but it might be different enough to warrant a separate class.
Kaliboy: My favorite subject when studying CompSci (TU Delft) was called "Concepts of programming languages". We learned C, Scala (for functional) and Javascript (prototypes).It made learning Elixir years later much easier.We also had a course that basically summed up to programming agents to play Unreal Tournament in a language called GOAL which was based on Prolog.For years I've wanted to use Prolog but could not figure out how. I ended up making a spellcheck to allow LLM's to iterate over and fix the dismal Papiamentu they generate.
pasc1878: Or for Lisp you might as well start with Emacs Lisp - you are going to use it for a decent environment unless you have the Common Lisp IDEs which you have to pay for or Racket.
gobdovan: there's a few more semantic families: verilog, petri nets and variants, Kahn process networks and dataflow machines, process calculi, reactive, term rewriting, constraint solvers/theorem provers (not the same with Prolog), probabilistic programming,plus up and coming (actual production-ready) languages that don't fit perfectly in the 7 categories: unison, darklang, temporal dataflow, DBSPIt may feel like a little bit of cheating mentioning the above ones, as most are parallel to the regular von Neumann machine setup, but was meaning for a while to do an article with 'all ways we know how to compute (beyond von Neumann)'.
gobdovan: also Sussman's propagators are nice to check out [0][0] The Art of the Propagator (mit url down for the moment)
burakemir: This article is full of gross mistakes. For example it claims that Caml is "Cambridge ML" which is ridiculously false. Fact check every sentence. Really sad.
anthk: Eh, no. You have Elisp+cl-lib but SBCL too, and you can use Sly wth SBCL.Of Lem with SBCL+Quicklisp:https://lem-project.github.io/usage/common_lisp/Huge tip: if you use MCCLIM, install Ultralisp first and (ql-quickload 'mcclim) later: it will give you a big speed boost. Big, not as the ones from Phoronix. Actually big. From 'I can almost see redrawing on a really old ass netbook' to 'snappy as TCL/Tk' under SBCL.https://ultralisp.org/As you can see, you don't need to pay thousands of dollars.For Scheme, S9 just targets R4RS but as a start it's more than enough, and for SICP you can install Emacs+Geiser+chicken Scheme and from any Linux/BSD: distro command prompt, you run: sudo chicken-install srfi-203 sudo chicken-install srfi-216 And, as a ~/.csirc file: (import scheme) (import (srfi 203)) (import (srfi 216)) To run SCM stuff for SICP: csi yourfile.scm or chicken-csi yourfile.scm Done. Get the SICP PDF and start doing SICP. You can use Emacs+Geiser with M-x install RET geiser-chicken if you are lazy. You can install the SICP book with M-xpackage-install RET sicp and read it from M-x info RET and do it everything from withing Emacs by running M-x geiser (pick chicken as the interpreter). Save your Emacs settings. Done.
Svip: For those curious: Cambridge ML is a thing, but abbreviated CML[0]; and whilst Caml is part of the ML family, it appears to be unrelated to CML.[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/FoundsCS/usingml.html
