Shane Hathaway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Mike Meyer wrote:
> > Basically, there's a *lot* of history in programming languages. I'd
> > hate to see someone think that we went straight from assembler to C,
> > or that people didn't understand the value of dynamic languages very
> > early.
>
> Yes, although I wasn't following historical events; I was following the
> trends of what programmers in general have used. Theory has always been
> far ahead of practice... and generalizations are never correct. ;-)
Well, I'd say that generalization isn't correct. I recall a period before C
became popular when a plethora of different languages were widely used,
depending on the application domain. COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, LISP, Pascal,
Snobol, PL/I, PL/360, APL, various assemblers and others all had their uses.
C (and later C++) has come to dominate a lot of application domains. But
it inherited a lot from those other languages, as did the VHLL's that
have started displacing C in some application domains. Those languages are
still worth studying, because you can see what they did wrong. And what,
in retrospect, they did right that was forgotten by C.
<mike
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Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.
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