5 ms·

What are the best programming articles?

6 points by joel_liu 18y ago

Sorry, the original URL is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/316461/what-are-the-best-programming-articles

astrec 18y ago
Pretty much anything on norvig.com and I'm also particularly fond of "The Hundred Year Language" (http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html)
- Kaizyn 18y ago
  You realize that at this point, the best candidate programming language for 100 year language is probably COBOL, followed after a good ways behind it by C. What about Lisp? I don't believe it's gaining new programmers at a fast enough rate to be a sustainable community in the long term.
  - gaius 18y ago
    FORTRAN too. All the kids who might've gone into Lisp are going into Python instead and asking the legitimate question, what can Lisp do that this can't? There's a lot of hand-waving from the Lisp community about this and that, but a lack of concrete example. On the academic high ground, there's Haskell and OCaml - both communities are actively working on "batteries included" distributions to bring their languages to the masses. The Lisp community took too much for granted for too long, they have become overtaken by events on both sides. It's not that Lisp will ever "die"... It'll just become irrelevant by the next generation.
    - lsb 18y ago
      Alan Kay, at his Turing award lecture: A couple of years ago we started this project called Squeak, which is simply not an attempt to give the world a free Smalltalk, but an attempt to give the world a bootstrapping mechanism for something much better than Smalltalk, and when you fool around with Squeak, please, please, think of it from that standpoint. Think of how you can obsolete the damn thing by using its own mechanisms for getting the next version of itself. Ruby, if memory serves, started out as a tiny Scheme that got a whole lot of agglomerations from Perl (regexps &c) and Smalltalk (objects &c).
    - Kaizyn 18y ago
      Lisp is neat in that the core language has mechanisms for extension built in. Do you know if any of the other up and coming languages have this same feature or capability? Can any of the stack-based Forth-like languages? Smalltalk is probably the closest thing to Lisp in this respect, but it too has been overtaken by events.
    - astrec 18y ago
      I really don't see the flying cars of the future powered by either FORTRAN or COBOL or even a descendent thereof - these are most likely not the hundred-year language, although they'll probably still be processing pay packets for Acme Corp another 100 years beyond that ;) I see Py3k as proof positive that Guido et. al. intend to create something enduring, and I'm also reasonably excited about F# and the ML family in general. Clojure seems to have reinvigorated interest in Lisps also, but with the benefit of one of the larger available libraries. Should be an interesting decade in language development.
      - gaius 18y ago
        I can guarantee that the CFD and FEA used to design said flying cars will be done with FORTRAN.

6 points by joel_liu 18y ago

Sorry, the original URL is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/316461/what-are-the-best-programming-articles

Pretty much anything on norvig.com and I'm also particularly fond of "The Hundred Year Language" (http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html)

Kaizyn 18y ago
You realize that at this point, the best candidate programming language for 100 year language is probably COBOL, followed after a good ways behind it by C. What about Lisp? I don't believe it's gaining new programmers at a fast enough rate to be a sustainable community in the long term.
- gaius 18y ago
  FORTRAN too. All the kids who might've gone into Lisp are going into Python instead and asking the legitimate question, what can Lisp do that this can't? There's a lot of hand-waving from the Lisp community about this and that, but a lack of concrete example. On the academic high ground, there's Haskell and OCaml - both communities are actively working on "batteries included" distributions to bring their languages to the masses. The Lisp community took too much for granted for too long, they have become overtaken by events on both sides. It's not that Lisp will ever "die"... It'll just become irrelevant by the next generation.
  - lsb 18y ago
    Alan Kay, at his Turing award lecture: A couple of years ago we started this project called Squeak, which is simply not an attempt to give the world a free Smalltalk, but an attempt to give the world a bootstrapping mechanism for something much better than Smalltalk, and when you fool around with Squeak, please, please, think of it from that standpoint. Think of how you can obsolete the damn thing by using its own mechanisms for getting the next version of itself. Ruby, if memory serves, started out as a tiny Scheme that got a whole lot of agglomerations from Perl (regexps &c) and Smalltalk (objects &c).
  - Kaizyn 18y ago
    Lisp is neat in that the core language has mechanisms for extension built in. Do you know if any of the other up and coming languages have this same feature or capability? Can any of the stack-based Forth-like languages? Smalltalk is probably the closest thing to Lisp in this respect, but it too has been overtaken by events.
  - astrec 18y ago
    I really don't see the flying cars of the future powered by either FORTRAN or COBOL or even a descendent thereof - these are most likely not the hundred-year language, although they'll probably still be processing pay packets for Acme Corp another 100 years beyond that ;) I see Py3k as proof positive that Guido et. al. intend to create something enduring, and I'm also reasonably excited about F# and the ML family in general. Clojure seems to have reinvigorated interest in Lisps also, but with the benefit of one of the larger available libraries. Should be an interesting decade in language development.
    - gaius 18y ago
      I can guarantee that the CFD and FEA used to design said flying cars will be done with FORTRAN.