4 ms·

Hurray for algebra! Still as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago. Are programming languages going to be equally durable?

• oskarkv 16y ago
  That's the goal of Arc. :)
  • jules 16y ago
    It would have to become relevant first though. I conjecture that no programming language alive now is going to be relevant in 100 years. If you look at the history of programming languages, this is not at all a bold conjecture.
• cema 16y ago
  Lisp, Fortran, Cobol have all been used and working, in one form or another, for more than 50 years. Algol, on the other hand, has evolved into a great family of languages. Not unlike Latin, if I might say so.
• tokenadult 16y ago
  Algebra reached its current durable form after centuries of development out of the verbally posed form it was in in the writings of Al-Khwarizmi. So hurrah for letters for unknown quantities (and the convention that "variables" are represented by one set of letters, usually, while "constants" are represented by a distinct set of letters, usually) and hurrah for explicit symbols for arithmetic operations. (I would also say hurrah for Descartes and analytic geometry, which does a lot to make algebra more comprehensible for many visual learners.)