cstjnodLaboratory notebook

Hobbies / Reading room · 20 notes

Languages

Exploring programming languages is one of the things I love doing. Each one introduced some clever part of computer science, and each has a story. Lisp most of all, which is how I ended up with Clojure.

From the vault of lineage, the app I built to read them in

SystemsObjectsλ and LispISWIM and MLLogicborrowed λ notationfirst MLbuilt in Lispfirst builtin PrologBEAM VM written in CLambda calculus1936Lisp1958ALGOL1960CPL1963ISWIM1966BCPL1967Simula1967B1969Logic programming1971C1972Smalltalk1972Prolog1972ML1973Erlang1986Clojure2007, hosted on the JVM
descent, parent to childis built infull entrynote

Languages

Full entries: the story, the people, the sources, and something to run.

  1. 1960ALGOLThe language that taught languages how to be written.
  2. 1972CA portable assembler that ate the world.
  3. 1972PrologState the truth; let the machine do the searching.
  4. 1986ErlangA language built so telephone calls never drop.
  5. 2007ClojureA Lisp for the JVM, with strong opinions about simplicity.

Concepts

The ideas and places the languages came out of.

  1. 1925Bell LabsMurray Hill, New Jersey — where the 20th century was invented.
  2. 1936Lambda CalculusComputation from nothing but functions.
  3. 1958LispCode is data. Data is code. 1958.
  4. 1960BNFHow you write down a grammar.
  5. 1967SimulaThe first object-oriented language, out of Oslo.
  6. 1971Logic ProgrammingPrograms as logical statements to be proved.
  7. 1972SmalltalkAlan Kay's messaging machine, out of Xerox PARC.
  8. 1973MLThe meta language that made the type checker your ally.
  9. 1973The Actor ModelEverything is an actor; the only verb is "send".

The durable layer

What outlives any one language.

  1. 1959Garbage CollectionLet the runtime own memory, not the programmer.
  2. 1967Objects and MessagesBundle state with the behavior that guards it.
  3. 1973Pattern MatchingModel data so illegal states can't be written down.
  4. 1986FailureDesign for when things break, not if.
  5. 2000ImmutabilityIf a value cannot change, whole classes of bugs cannot exist.
  6. 2007StateIdentity, value, and time — untangled.