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A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)
- ColinWright 12y agoIn case you're wondering why this obviously brilliant article doesn't get much discussion, or many votes, some people here have seen it before. Here are some of the previous submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=brief+incomplete#!/story/forever/prefix/0/brief%20incomplete https://hn.algolia.com/?q=brief+incomplete#!/story/forever/p... Of course, it may again get lots of discussion and lots of up-votes. We'll see. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7263243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7263243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6953863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6953863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1475826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1475826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1310127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1310127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164
- danso 12y agoGod DAMN you put more work into meta-summary than most of us put into actual comments ;) I know there's been talk about it, but has anyone hacked together a quickie-scraper tool or mini-app that would, given a HN submission, find similar submissions, and generate a plaintext list like the parent comment, but maybe with some metadata (such as date of submission, number of comments, number of upvotes). I'll put that on my side projects list but I bet someone more OCD than me has already done something like this.
- ColinWright 12y agoI have a bunch of half-finished, partially working, user-hostile tools. I can't bundle or release them, it would take too long to write what they do, and don't do. I could do something like you say, but again, as you say, I'd bet someone else has already mostly done it. I wonder if I could cobble together from what I have something that I could make public. Next time I cross-reference stuff I'll leave a trail of bread-crumbs to see if I can regularize/semi-automate it.
- raverbashing 12y ago"I have a bunch of half-finished, partially working, user-hostile tools. I can't bundle or release them" This was never a problem for the Autotools people
- notduncansmith 12y agoThe search box at the bottom of the page does a pretty good job, given a title :) Depends on what you mean by "similar submissions", though. Similar titles (similar in topic? Sentiment? Levenshtein distance?), identical links, similar linked content (similar how?), etc.
- ColinWright 12y agoFrequently you need to pick a single word, or perhaps two, from the title in order to find related articles. Using something like TF-IDF on submission titles (perhaps after mods have "normalized" them) then works well on the search. Then you want to make sure the articles really are the same, so you need to download the article, extract the relevant text, and do a similar sort of comparison. Or just eyeball it. Or allow for mistakes. Then there's the question of deciding whether it's worth having a cross-reference at all. Heuristics about number of comments, age of submission, etc, might be relevant. In general, it's complicated.
- pronoiac 12y agoIf memory serves, someone built this with a semi-automated account, he got some (to him) surprisingly heated criticism from the community, and he stopped.
- agarcia-deniz 12y agosaved me the work of pointing out that this really good post has been submitted before many a times :)
- nightpool 12y agoMy favorite is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728843 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728844, where two people post the exact same article within presumably minutes of each other, and manage to achieve sequential ids.
- danso 12y agoOK, I was bored...made a tool that produces even more messier output :) At least I got to try out the HN API https://github.com/dannguyen/hn_dupesum https://github.com/dannguyen/hn_dupesum ============================ Stories containing the title of "a brief history of programming" received: At least 20 submissions from 2008-05-18 to 2014-05-25, i.e. ~109 days between each submission - At least 1338 points, i.e. ~66.9 points per submission - At least 176 comments, i.e. ~8.8 comments per submission ============================ Submission #1 by DanielRibeiro: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896 2012-01-24 (~852 days ago) 389 points and 45 comments Top comments: - bitops [27 points]: Only two minor quibbles: 1) did not mention Clojure. 2) broke the amusing narrative a bit in the middle by including a true story (Perl). Really funny otherwise. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504001] - f4stjack [26 points]: "1996 - James Gosling invents Java. Java is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Sun loudly heralds Java's novelty. 2001 - Anders Hejlsberg invents C#. C# is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. ... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503969] - perfunctory [24 points]: My favourite is actually: 1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504067] Submission #2 by toddc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164 2009-05-08 (~1844 days ago) 299 points and 14 comments Top comments: - tumult [52 points]: Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them. Alright, this was surprisingly amusing. Thanks. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599281] - jfarmer [33 points]: My favorite:\n1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599308] - visitor4rmindia [17 points]: Oh my God! That was the best belly laugh I've had in a long time. Very fun read. > 1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later stil, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599345] Submission #3 by ldubinets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 2013-05-12 (~378 days ago) 209 points and 33 comments Top comments: - ldubinets [26 points]: It took me a couple minutes too... The first comment sorts it out though. Turns out that Jacquard's loom was multi-threaded after all. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5697144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5697144] - mercuryrising [17 points]: I like this. I like this a lot. I think far too often people take the concepts we study too seriously. Things get challenging, things get precise, but the moment the humor leaves, the creativity is gone. Think of how easy it would be to learn something if you make a joke every 5 minutes while learning it (about the subject). In your mind, you turned this abstract concept into something else, something funny, something with pathways and connections that weren't expected. You manipulated it, chan... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696773] - Symmetry [17 points]: Reminds me of C being described as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language". [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696368] --- (output truncated)
- slashnull 12y ago> Other well known languages in the ML family include OCaml, F#, and Visual Basic. Every. Single. Time.