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> the 120 programming languages in use in 1960 Geez, I think I'd struggle to name 120 programming languages in total right now.
by jamesfinlayson 4y ago
> the 120 programming languages in use in 1960
Geez, I think I'd struggle to name 120 programming languages in total right now.
- wglb 4y agoAnd there have been more than a handful invented in the intervening 60 years.
- gamegoblin 4y agoNot 120, but a decent list of stuff I'd never heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languages#1960s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_langua...
- hackerman123469 4y agoI guess people reinventing the wheel with a new programming language isn't just some newer-age thing, but happened frequently decades ago too.
- jamesfinlayson 4y agoTrue, though I guess they were all working in more isolated ways than we are today too. Probably the compilers were very much tied to the machines they were written on as well (I know we have lots of architectures today but I get the impression it wasn't like today where x86 dominates).
- tengwar2 4y agoIt was also common to invent "tiny languages" (e.g. PIC) and domain-specific languages (e.g. Awk, Yacc) to a greater extent than now. There was no real community to share work. I heard of OO and C++, but didn't really understand it, so when I tried to make my own I made functions that dispatched on the type of the first argument, then another version which could dispatch on the types of any the arguments. We would call this data-oriented now. I suspect that a lot of new stuff arose from such misunderstandings.