2 ms·

When was any? I find these sorts of things crumble in your hands, because as soon as you pick a candidate you find yourself thinking "but that was just a varia

by pg 18y ago

When was any? I find these sorts of things crumble in your hands, because as soon as you pick a candidate you find yourself thinking "but that was just a variant of such-and-such earlier idea."

sctb 18y ago
I think that such transformational ideas, although possibly variations on previous ideas like you say, can have a certain distinct paradigmatic quality that the OP is referring to. I would offer up Miranda (1985) as an example: non-strict, purely functional.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- sctb 18y ago
  It appears that Turner has languages in this paradigm dating back to 1972 with SASL. Are there others?
gruseom 18y ago
I know what you mean - Smalltalk was Lisp + Simula and so on. Yet even if everything's a hybrid, some hybrids feel plainly derivative while others seem magically deep. In order to avoid tedious arguments about historical primacy, perhaps a better way to phrase the question is: what languages (or language ideas) feel most fundamental to people? I've given my list. What strikes me is how there isn't anything more recent on it. This may just be my ignorance.
- yters 18y ago
  Even more broadly, when was the last big idea in academia? Yes, they've mapped the human genome and all that, but that's just grunt work, not a big idea that lead to new fruitful research. I don't know a lot about the different disciplines, but it seems like math is running out of steam, so I've heard from a PhD student who switched to CS.
bdfh42 18y ago
I think you are right - all that we have now is ultimately derived from the structure of the underlying machine and that model has not undergone any fundamental change since the earliest iterations. For a truly transformational step we need a new machine.
- gruseom 18y ago
  That's interesting. I'd like to see a machine that uses continuous rather than discrete logic. I think there would be less of an impedance mismatch with humans.
mechanical_fish 18y ago
Thus does the creator of Arc manage to compress the entire career of James Burke into a single sentence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) Not that the long-form version isn't entertaining as well.
- pg 18y ago
  That was my favorite TV series of all when I was a kid.

by pg 18y ago

When was any? I find these sorts of things crumble in your hands, because as soon as you pick a candidate you find yourself thinking "but that was just a variant of such-and-such earlier idea."

sctb 18y ago

I think that such transformational ideas, although possibly variations on previous ideas like you say, can have a certain distinct paradigmatic quality that the OP is referring to. I would offer up Miranda (1985) as an example: non-strict, purely functional.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
sctb 18y ago
It appears that Turner has languages in this paradigm dating back to 1972 with SASL. Are there others?

gruseom 18y ago

I know what you mean - Smalltalk was Lisp + Simula and so on. Yet even if everything's a hybrid, some hybrids feel plainly derivative while others seem magically deep. In order to avoid tedious arguments about historical primacy, perhaps a better way to phrase the question is: what languages (or language ideas) feel most fundamental to people? I've given my list. What strikes me is how there isn't anything more recent on it. This may just be my ignorance.

yters 18y ago
Even more broadly, when was the last big idea in academia? Yes, they've mapped the human genome and all that, but that's just grunt work, not a big idea that lead to new fruitful research. I don't know a lot about the different disciplines, but it seems like math is running out of steam, so I've heard from a PhD student who switched to CS.

bdfh42 18y ago

I think you are right - all that we have now is ultimately derived from the structure of the underlying machine and that model has not undergone any fundamental change since the earliest iterations. For a truly transformational step we need a new machine.

gruseom 18y ago
That's interesting. I'd like to see a machine that uses continuous rather than discrete logic. I think there would be less of an impedance mismatch with humans.

mechanical_fish 18y ago

Thus does the creator of Arc manage to compress the entire career of James Burke into a single sentence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) Not that the long-form version isn't entertaining as well.

pg 18y ago
That was my favorite TV series of all when I was a kid.