Sunday, September 11, 2022

chilling out on the iceberg of languages

Great video about the languages out there...

After watching it, and it's reference to "Jr" programmers, I feel a little better as a senior, seeing just how many of these I've used. (BASIC, JS, SQL, Java, C... even ASM for my Atari 2600 project.) 

A few personal historical notes from the 90s (and from the 80s):

  • They missed out on Logo, huge in the 80s, which was lowkey a (kid friendly!) version of Lisp and featured turtle graphics, helping kids think about geometry via a drawing "turtle"
  • I feel like Java hit me at my peak learnability so I'm always surprised when it's considered so daunting. (Admittedly I kept using it in its friendly "Processing" form, and ducked out when the syntax started getting weird and Template-y)
  • It took a weirdly long time for C++ to standardize its libraries for even basic input and output.
  • I think they skipped over Perl? Probably its obliquely referenced in the "Historically Important Row" with the O'Reilly Camel. For me it was critical for learning things like maps and regexes when all I had had was BASIC and C... then it became my goto for dynamic stuff on websites I made, til PHP came around. (And I was started to learn that Perl was actually a wrapper script for all this Unix-C stuff... really weird given how smoothly it handled memory and strings and how its hodge podge syntax was the only hint to its frankenstein nature...)

Still, I don't have a love of learning a language for its own sake, like for keeping the brain flexible about syntax, say. I just want to build interactions and so there are more important problems at hand!

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