The accelerating adoption of Julia

Posted Oct 21, 2020 16:14 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: The accelerating adoption of Julia by droundy
Parent article: The accelerating adoption of Julia

> I don't care for the idea of a siloed language

Name me just ONE language that was *conceived* as a general-purpose language. Okay, many have morphed into general purpose languages, but ...

COmmon Business Oriented Language
FORmula TRANslation
ADA was designed as a secure language
C was designed as glorified assembler for system stuff
Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction C??? okay it says all-purpose but it also says beginners ...
Pascal was designed as a teaching language - Modula-2 was a more all-purpose evolution
APL and J were mathematical notations intended to be evaluated by a computer

That's SEVEN (or eight) siloed languages off the top of my head ... oh yes, add another - one of my favourites - DataBASIC for programming databases.

As I said, can you name ONE that was DESIGNED as a general purpose language? Oh yes, possibly PL/1 which was meant to be all things to all men, and mostly was nothing to anybody.

Cheers,
Wol

The accelerating adoption of Julia

Posted Oct 21, 2020 22:15 UTC (Wed) by jkowing (subscriber, #5172) [Link] (1 responses)

> Oh yes, possibly PL/1 which was meant to be all things

Picking classes to take with no guidance, I remember (long ago) taking Programming Language 1 offered in the computer science department at my college. I was thinking - hey - this sounds like THE programming language to know - after all, it is number 1. I was feeling pretty good about myself. Then, after completing the course, I was told that will be the last time they offer it and it was removed from the curriculum. And that was the last of my PL/1 programming.

Oh well. At least my C (which doesn't sound very important at all - and certainly must not as good as fancy and powerful as B and A) still keeps going strong!

The accelerating adoption of Julia

Posted Oct 21, 2020 23:19 UTC (Wed) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450) [Link]

In graduate school (1980s, physics) one astronomer, our resident computer expert, was pushing PL/1 hard. He believed it was the perfect language and would rule the future. I was recommending APL to everyone. Of course, eventually, I wound up using Fortran for all my simulations, as did everyone else.

The accelerating adoption of Julia

Posted Oct 23, 2020 11:04 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Raku

(now that was easy)

The accelerating adoption of Julia

Posted Oct 24, 2020 15:30 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

My company offers an online training course to its employees in the IBM mainframe debugger for COBOL, PL/1 and assembly. Not my department, but I think it says something about how much more impact PL/1 had than generally given credit for. It never was the juggernaut IBM wanted, but it got a good 15, 20 year run and a bunch of legacy code is around even today.

The accelerating adoption of Julia

Posted Oct 25, 2020 6:31 UTC (Sun) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

You're stretching any sensible definition of "siloed language" wayyy too far:

COBOL: being "business oriented" is a fairly general goal

ADA: being designed with security in mind is not the same thing as being designed to address the security problem domain: the goal was a language that worked in many problem domains, all of which had secure functioning as a desired attribute.

C: Seriously? A language targeting "problems that can be solved with a assembled program" is about a general purpose as it gets..

C++, Java were explicitly general purpose.

Even LISP had a pretty general problem domain in mind:

"The system was designed to facilitate experiments with a proposed system called the Advice Taker, whereby a machine could be instructed to handle declarative as well as imperative sentences and could exhibit ``common sense'' in carrying out its instructions."

I think even the creators of Prolog *hoped* it could somehow solve problems in a wide variety of domains.

I think the reverse is probably more true: the authors of a language *think* they found a way to encode solutions that if the world just thought exactly like them, we'd see that it really is a general purpose language. Stuff like Erlang, ostensibly for a specific use, but the creators obviously suffer under a delusion that it would be really useful everywhere.