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Four Languages from Forty Years Ago - Scott Wlaschin

NDC Conferences · 32.7K views · 2018-08-15 · 1:01:45

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Overview

Scott Wlaschin's NDC Oslo talk on four 1970s languages, SQL, Prolog, ML and Smalltalk. It explains their philosophies and what practical principles they still offer modern developers.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a sampling of truly different programming paradigms beyond mainstream OOP.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2019–2022

Topics

Programming language designFunctional programmingDatabases & storage
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sqlprologmlsmalltalklanguage design

What people said

yawaramin · 2020-02 · Strong recommendation

> I've learned many languages including C, Objective C, Java, Python, Ruby, JS, and some Haskell. You've learned basically the same language over and over again: Algol-family imperative-OO-mishmash. Haskell is probably the most unique out of all of them, and I'm inclined to think you haven't gone too far with it. Perhaps you know SQL though and recognize how a relational (roughly, set-oriented) language can work. My point is that I understand that Go offers you some compelling advantages. We're just saying that other languages offer some pretty amazing things too, and they are even better designed (as languages) than Go. Check out this fantastic talk by Scott Wlaschin to get a sampling of truly different language paradigms and how they approach problems: [VIDEO]

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souenzzo · 2019-07 · Recommendation

Rust, Go, Julia, Nim are all cruly braced, procedural, mutable, object oriented languages. I think we need languages that bring new paradigms. All that you quoted fail in this respect. [VIDEO]

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hazelnut-tree · 2022-08 · Reference

I posted a talk on HN recently about four programming languages from the 1970s - Smalltalk was one of the languages discussed. Smalltalk has a object-oriented programming model (OOP) with notable differences to the more familiar OOP model from languages like Java and C#. Smalltalk also has an windowing IDE (eschews separate text files), a consistent model, and minimal syntax (just 3 keywords). It's a very interesting language. Here's a Smalltalk demo from the talk: Four Languages from Forty Years Ago (2018) (44min mark): [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by NDC Conferences, played through YouTube.

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