Lambda the Ultimate

In my defense, I was getting lazy near the end (not to mention I've never heard of 3-Lisp). :-)

Come to think of it our coverage of 3-Lisp is indeed pretty weak.

but (for those of us who don't know) it looks to be reflection and self-modification gone gang-busters. in lisp.

I think I can help to identify the first one in the list

http://ershov.iis.nsk.su/ershov/english/index.html

http://ershov.iis.nsk.su/ershov/english/scient.html

From a PL perspective, Ershov appears to have been involved with Alpha and Rapira. Alpha dates to 1961 is an extension of Algol - though a cursory search appears to yield few details. Rapira was an educational PL with Russian keywords.

I was also wondering about INTERCAL and Befunge. Maybe Whitespace is missing? I guess it's not all too serious. I'd also say awk is a scripting language that preceded Perl...

Some of the PLs chosen, such as Piet, were merely punchlines to a joke. Others were intended as the logical conclusion to a paradigm. Awk may have preceded Perl, but Perl probably serves as a better overall example of a scripting language - even if it is amalgam of scripting languages that came before it.

[Edit note: Of course, their selection of KRC instead of Haskell kind of runs counter to the whole *best* example argument] :-)

I suppose one could fall back on the old adage about: The more people that you invite to a party, the more you leave out. But I think Alan McInnes gave some insight on a slide presentation of an unrelated PL history from Stroustrap:

I found the slides to be interesting, and am glad that you posted the story. I think the key is to look at the slides not as an objective (pun intended) history of programming languages, but as a presentation of Bjarne Stroustrup's perspective on that history. Which is an interesting thing in itself. The fact that, to take one example that someone else here already raised, Stroustrup gave such a small amount of attention to Lisp helps us to understand why C++ is the way it is.

There was brief mention of aspects in the presentation. Given Gregor Kiczales history, it is well known that the AOP has deep roots with Lisp.

Anyhow, your non sequitur first post and your pseudonym that goes against the spirit of LtU policies, I'd tag you as a spammer.

Yes, it is rather weird.

Since they were deeply into the dept of silly walks, the list needs to be heavily redacted for those who are looking for a more refined breakdown of history.

I've never understood the interaction between Modula-2, CLU and Alpherd, but all of them were influential.

Icon requires looking at Griswold's work with SNOBOL, which was mentioned, though the approach to pattern matching was different - with Icon using success/failure generators.

Yeah I just noticed that you were going for more of a chart of what they talked about rather than a chart of your own.

Perhaps a chart that's more fleshed out and with a few more features would be a neat project.

Such a table would be mostly subjective, as the problems being addressed by languages, as well as the chosen solutions, are not always clear cut. So, even before you began discussing what language begat what feature, you have to make a call on the major ideas - past, present and future.

Personally, I'd prefer to see a James Burke-ish sort of Connections, wherein you take a problem and thread it through the history of programming languages. The interaction between languages over time is usually much more complex than A-then-B causality.

Which - Piet and Shakespeare?

I was sad to see the lack of Homespring...

At the beginning of the speech, Guy says that it isn't 50 languages, but that they are making 50 comments of 50 words each. That introductory statement counts as one of the one of the 50-word comments. So the table should have as the first box "Introduction".