The seven programming ur-languages (2022) (madhadron.com)

[1]: https://www.cambridge.org/ir/universitypress/subjects/comput...

Ruby is object oriented from the ground up. Everything (and I do mean everything) is an object, and method call is conceived as passing messages to objects.

While Ruby is most often compared to Python (an Algol), they come from very different evolutionary routes, and have converged towards the same point in the ecosystem. I think of Ruby as a cuddly Alpaca compared to Python's spitting camel.

The results surprised me:

             F#  100    19.17s  ±0.04s
            C++   96    19.92s  ±0.13s
           Rust   95    20.20s  ±0.38s
         Kotlin   89    21.51s  ±0.04s
          Scala   88    21.68s  ±0.04s
  Kotlin-native   81    23.69s  ±0.11s
   Scala-native   77    24.72s  ±0.03s
            Nim   69    27.92s  ±0.04s
          Julia   63    30.54s  ±0.08s
          Swift   52    36.86s  ±0.03s
          Ocaml   47    41.10s  ±0.10s
        Haskell   40    47.94s  ±0.06s
           Chez   39    49.46s  ±0.04s
           Lean   10   198.63s  ±1.02s

plus up and coming (actual production-ready) languages that don't fit perfectly in the 7 categories: unison, darklang, temporal dataflow, DBSP

It 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)'.

We agree on Algol, Lisp, Forth, APL, and Prolog. For ground-breaking functional language, I have SASL (St Andrews Static Language), which (just) predates ML, and for object oriented language, I have Smalltalk (which predates Self).

I also include Fortran, COBOL, SNOBOL (string processing), and Prograph (visual dataflow), which were similarly ground-breaking in different ways.

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.

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.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cognate

We didn't learn APL (Who is teaching the use of those custom keyboards to 100s of young students for one semester?)

The processing power of systems at the time made it clear which language classes were practically useful and usable for the time and which were not.

Prolog ran like a dog for even simple sets of logic.

We had the best internet access and pretty powerful desktop systems for the time.

I'm still curious why we didn't learn smalltalk. Could have been the difficulty of submitting and marking a system in a particular state rather than a file of code :)

One I might suggest is scripting languages, defined loosely by programming tools which dispatch high-level commands to act on data pipelines: sed, AWK, the sh family, Perl, PowerShell, Python and R as honorary members. In practice I might say SQL belongs here instead of under Prolog, but in theory of course SQL is like Prolog. Bourne shell might be the best representative, even if it's not the oldest.

AWK et al share characteristics from ALGOL and APL, but I feel they are very much their own thing. PowerShell is quite unique among modern languages.

At the same time, I don't agree with that it does not matter if one picks "Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby". If your goal is to do quick sort, then well, it does not.

If you want to use language for something (not only for its sake), then it makes a day and night difference. A person who wants to do 3D games and being shown Ruby or a person wanting to do exploratory data science and deep learning and being given Java are likely to get discouraged.

1) Advanced Programming Language Design by Raphael Finkel - A classic (late 90s) book comparing a whole smorgasbord of languages.

2) Design Concepts in Programming Languages by Franklyn Turbak et al. - A comprehensive (and big) book on PL design.

3) Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming by Peter Van Roy et al. - Shows how to organically add different programming paradigms to a simple core language.

> "What do I mean when I say fundamentals? If you have an array or list of items and you’re going to loop over it, that is the same in any imperative language."

Err

"Fortran: The world’s first programming language standard opened the door to modern computing"

https://www.ibm.com/history/fortran

One thing the article didn’t touch on was SmallTalk’s live visual environment. It’s not a normal source code / text language.

- 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.tgz

Helping Forth code for GForth/PFE. If you put it under scilib/fs-util.fs, load it with:

    s" scilib/fsu-util.fs" included

- 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.html

Then 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/

Simply.scm file, select from ';;; simply.scm version 3.13 (8/11/98)' to '(strings-are-numbers #t)' and save it as simply.scm

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ssch27/appendix-simply....

Concrete Abstractions

Book:

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-concabs

If 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))

    >(square 20) 
    400

    (defun square (x)
     (* x x))

     >(square 20)
     400

https://www.t3x.org/mlite/index.html

If 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.

https://canonical.org/~kragen/memory-models/

in jq, the comma separates expressions, which independently yield values. a span of such expressions is called a 'filter', since they are always run by passing values from the prior filter into them (with the initial values sourcing from json objects on stdin, or an implicit null if you pass -n to the program).

    $ jq -nc ' def x: "a", "b", "c" ; def y: 1, 2, 3 ; x, y '
    "a"
    "b"
    "c"
    1
    2
    3

    $ jq -c '. + 10, . + 20' <<< '1 2 3'
    11
    21
    12
    22
    13
    23

    $ jq -nc ' def x: "a", "b", "c" ; def y: 1, 2, 3 ; [x,y] '
    ["a","b","c",1,2,3]

    $ jq -nc ' def x: "a", "b", "c" ; def y: 1, 2, 3 ; {"foo": x, "bar": y} '
    {"foo":"a","bar":1}
    {"foo":"a","bar":2}
    {"foo":"a","bar":3}
    {"foo":"b","bar":1}
    {"foo":"b","bar":2}
    {"foo":"b","bar":3}
    {"foo":"c","bar":1}
    {"foo":"c","bar":2}
    {"foo":"c","bar":3}

    $ jq -nc ' 1,2,3 | 10 + . '
    11
    12
    13
    $ jq -nc ' 1,2,3 | (10 + .) * . '
    11
    24
    39

    $ jq -nc ' (1,2,3) as $A | $A + $A '
    2
    4
    6

for example, this runs . + 100 parameters context, with . as the 10,20,30 passed to it:

    $ jq -nc ' def f($t): 1,2,3|$t ; 10,20,30|f(. + 100) '
    110
    110
    110
    120
    120
    120
    130
    130
    130

    $ jq -nc ' def f(t): 1,2,3|t ; 10,20,30|f(. + 100) '
    101
    102
    103
    101
    102
    103
    101
    102
    103

    $ jq -nc ' def m(todo): [.[]|todo] ; [1,2,3]|m(. * 10) '
    [10,20,30]

for example, I would say what i was taught, that lisp is lists made out of cons cells, which contain references to either other lists/cons cells or to atoms. lisp doesn't "have" parentheses any more than lisp has the rest of the ASCII table, but parentheses were chosen as a convenient way to write list structure down in ascii form because parentheses nest in exactly the way lists do and lists are the important thing.

then there never needs to be another discussion of parentheses and how you feel about them except in a sub-discussion if anybody has any bright ideas about alternative ways to convert list structure to ascii on paper. you disliking parentheses does not mean you dislike lisp; it just means you don't understand lisp, like for instance you think lisp has something to do with ascii.

similar ideas apply to C, wherein the braces and semicolons do not matter, what matters is datatypes that correspond to von neumann architectures including especially pointers, and where binary representation is easily exposed (with a syntax that does not matter but for the record is &, |, ~, ^, <<, or >>. if you hate those choices for operator syntax you could easily convert your own C to use parenthetical lists of CamelCase names of LeftAddRight or whatever floats your boat instead of a + sign), just keep in the front of your mind how data is represented internally and how it's mapped to the syntax you like, and whatever list structure you choose to order the lines of code)

Ur-ness is not interesting, just as the city of Ur was no doubt a lot less interesting than the city of Rome. Study Algol only to learn about call-by-name, then forget it.

I could go on, but, like the ripples from a gold coin thrown in the bay, the effect will soon dissipate as if I had never written anything at all.