Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Responses to Contributions of Individual Programming Languages to Software Development

My recent post Contributions of Individual Programming Languages to Software Development has received numerous useful and informative responses that I highlight here. Because select posts to this blog are syndicated to JavaWorld, DZone/JavaLobby, and Java Code Geeks, the responses to my blog posts sometimes appear on those various sites (all of which, by the way, are highly useful sites for Java developers). I am using this post as a centralized location for these educational responses.

When I originally published Contributions of Individual Programming Languages to Software Development, I forgot to include my text on Java, other JVM languages, PHP, and Ada, but those are now covered in the original post and are reflected as well in the DZone and Java Code Geeks syndicated versions.

Clay Shannon highlighted (and Hans Salvisberg emphasized) the influence of Delphi on software development in a comment on the DZone syndicated version of my post. Clay wrote that C# "really drew most of its inspiration from Delphi; Anders Hejlsberg, the C# architect, was poached/seduced away from Borland by the Redmondians. Hejlsberg was the main cat behind Delphi, and forsooth, many Delphiesque thingamajigs reappeared rebranded in his other brainchild, C#."

Luciano Quadraccia wrote on the DZone version of my post about ALGOL and provided a historical anecdote to back up the premise of the significant influence of that language. He concluded, "So, ALGOL was the preferred vehicle for code sharing (at least in the scientific community), and was probably the first general purpose mainstream language with recursion."

In a response to the Java Code Geeks version of my post, Howard Fear mentioned the influences of languages such as Tcl ("really took the concept of DSLs to another level") and Eiffel (one I wish I had mentioned in my original post because I agree with Howard's assessment that it "had a big impact on the development of object oriented programming languages").

There were a few programming languages mentioned that I knew nothing or next to nothing about. These include Forth (mentioned on DZone by Curtis Esac). Howard Fear also mentioned Snobol in a response to the Java Code Geeks version of my post and stated that without Snobol "there would be no shell, awk, perl, or the myriad of other scripting languages."

In a response to my original post, Boffin wrote of the influence of frameworks/computing platforms CUDA and Hadoop.

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