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C++ seems to have made some progress in the last few decades. Python improves on BASIC in some ways. Java, JavaScript, Swift, and Rust have memory safety like L

C++ seems to have made some progress in the last few decades. Python improves on BASIC in some ways. Java, JavaScript, Swift, and Rust have memory safety like Lisp, PL/I and Ada did. But I tend to agree - the biggest advances seem to be in hardware: now you can run Unix on an internet-connected watch, voice recognition/translation/automatic transcription on a mobile phone, and real-time ray tracing on a game console.

pjmlp 4y ago
Most of that progress is catching up with what we already had, as you kind of point out on your memory safety remark. C++ improvements are related to the bare language itself, in regards to tooling, no one seemed to have cared to go beyond what something like C++ Builder has been doing for the last 30 years (more or less). Python improves on BASIC, while still missing the compilation story from most BASICs. Diving into Xerox PARC documentation about Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa XDE and Mesa/Cedar is quite revealing in what we already had 40 years ago, and how long it has taken to bring those ideas back into mainstream.