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Four Languages from Forty Years Ago - Scott Wlaschin

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  • Recommended by 5 people: 2 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 2 in engineering communities.
  • Presented by Scott Wlaschin

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

32K views8 years ago5 recommendations

Programming languagesHistory and cultureLanguage design and type systemsHistory of computing

Scott Wlaschin explores the philosophies of SQL, Prolog, ML, and Smalltalk, and what modern developers can learn from them.

The 1970's were a golden age for new programming languages, but do they have any relevance to programming today? Can we still learn from them? In this talk, we'll look at four languages designed over forty years ago -- SQL, Prolog, ML, and Smalltalk -- and discuss their philosophy and approach to programming, which is very different from most popular languages today. We'll come away with some practical principles that are still very applicable to modern development. And you might discover your new favorite programming paradigm! NDC Conferences ndcoslo.com ndcconferences.com

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5 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a fantastic introduction to different programming paradigms and how they approach problems.

Moments people linked to

u/cyancynicin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends

Four Languages from Forty Years Ago - Scott Wlaschin

u/Ainar-Gin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends

Four Languages from Forty Years Ago - Scott Wlaschin

yawaraminon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Zen of Go”

…. My point is that I understand that Go offers you some compelling advantages. We're just saying that other languages offer some pretty amazing things too, and they are even better designed (as languages) than Go. Check out this fantastic talk by Scott Wlaschin to get a sampling of truly different language paradigms and how they approach problems: link to this video…

enkiv2on Lobsters • Recommends

Four Languages from Forty Years Ago

souenzzoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?”

Rust, Go, Julia, Nim are all cruly braced, procedural, mutable, object oriented languages. I think we need languages that bring new paradigms. All that you quoted fail in this respect. link to this video

programming-talkscurated list on GitHubMentions

Under “Programming Language Design”

Four Languages from Forty Years Ago 01:01:45 by **Scott Wlaschin** (2018)

u/johnfrazer783in r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions

On “Can I totally replace Null/Optional Types with Exceptions only?”

…ut certainly doing that all of the time for all my code wouldn't improve things a bit. FWIW the CoffeeScript way of allowing you to simply say `x = v.k ? 42` is great and I think far superior to doing the exception-catching game *when you know you want to check explicitly*. As for "which language-level defaults are sane for my new language" watch link to this video (Scott Wlaschin, "Four Languages from Forty Years Ago") which makes some very reasonable suggestions that I wish were more popular among people who author PLs.…
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hazelnut-treeon Hacker News • Mentions

On “50 years Smalltalk anniversary celebration at Computer History Museum”

I posted a talk on HN recently about four programming languages from the 1970s - Smalltalk was one of the languages discussed. Smalltalk has a object-oriented programming model (OOP) with notable differences to the more familiar OOP model from languages like Java and C#. Smalltalk also has an windowing IDE (eschews separate text files), a consistent model, and minimal syntax (just 3 keywords). It's a very interesting language. Here's a Smalltalk demo from the talk: Four Languages from Forty Years Ago (2018) (44min mark): link to this video

u/bart2019in r/compsci • Mentions

On “Interesting, wonder why there is a dip at 45 years of experience?”

My guess is that it's the era when these people started: it's a cultural thing. Note that a range of people that are older have even more interest in alternative programming languages. p.s. Slightly OT, but yesterday I happened to see a video (though it's a year old), of a talk at a conference on 4 programming languages from the 1970s. Damn interesting, highly recommended. link to this video