IT history
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B
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
:-) I'd call that an insider joke. B certainly is C's predecessor, but it hardly went mainstream. Very few programmers know anything at all about B without checking Wikipedia - and even after doing that, they probably have to read the fine print to distinguish a B program from a C program.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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What was the mainstream programming language before C took the lead?
We wrote machine code directly. In octal, because base 10 hadn't been invented yet. On punch cards. In Sanskrit In the snow, up hill, both ways.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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We wrote machine code directly. In octal, because base 10 hadn't been invented yet. On punch cards. In Sanskrit In the snow, up hill, both ways.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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What was the mainstream programming language before C took the lead?
The question does not have a definitive answer. You can't even answer the same question now and there are more ways to collect data. Following is the source I have used for a very long time. And I consider the data collection better than others but it is certainly open to question. TIOBE Index - TIOBE[^]
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We wrote machine code directly. In octal, because base 10 hadn't been invented yet. On punch cards. In Sanskrit In the snow, up hill, both ways.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Obligatory xkcd :)
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The question does not have a definitive answer. You can't even answer the same question now and there are more ways to collect data. Following is the source I have used for a very long time. And I consider the data collection better than others but it is certainly open to question. TIOBE Index - TIOBE[^]
I certainly would not use the TIOBE Index as a reliable source of truth, though. Maybe it can tell you "something", but to me it appears like self-referencing: The TIOBE Index tells which languages top the TIOBE Index. Like "intelligence" is defined as "What you measure in an IQ test". To take one example: Last month, C popularity dropped by 2.38%, in a single month. No, that is not for real. Popularity doesn't change that rapidly for a well established and very widespread language (unless there are some strong, external factors that has hit the headlines of every software oriented internet publication). The presentation of the September 2024 values states that "C is currently at position #4, which is its lowest position ever since the start of the TIOBE index in 2001." That may be true, but the current reading is 8.89% - in August 2017 it was at 6.48%, that is significantly lower popularity. So is the popularity of a language given by the number of people / projects using it, or by how much (or little) the users of other languages tend to center on many or few other languages? You can use statistics to prove whatever you want. I also question their data collection methods. E.g. entries 51-100 are listed without sorting, so they don't reveal whether whitespace is #51, #100 or somewhere inbetween. Even if it really is #100: I refuse to believe that whitespace really is the 100th most popular programming language. Something is not 100% reliable in their collection of data.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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I certainly would not use the TIOBE Index as a reliable source of truth, though. Maybe it can tell you "something", but to me it appears like self-referencing: The TIOBE Index tells which languages top the TIOBE Index. Like "intelligence" is defined as "What you measure in an IQ test". To take one example: Last month, C popularity dropped by 2.38%, in a single month. No, that is not for real. Popularity doesn't change that rapidly for a well established and very widespread language (unless there are some strong, external factors that has hit the headlines of every software oriented internet publication). The presentation of the September 2024 values states that "C is currently at position #4, which is its lowest position ever since the start of the TIOBE index in 2001." That may be true, but the current reading is 8.89% - in August 2017 it was at 6.48%, that is significantly lower popularity. So is the popularity of a language given by the number of people / projects using it, or by how much (or little) the users of other languages tend to center on many or few other languages? You can use statistics to prove whatever you want. I also question their data collection methods. E.g. entries 51-100 are listed without sorting, so they don't reveal whether whitespace is #51, #100 or somewhere inbetween. Even if it really is #100: I refuse to believe that whitespace really is the 100th most popular programming language. Something is not 100% reliable in their collection of data.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
At the risk of repeating myself: "Statistics are used by rascals to convince fools" Author unknown (to me)
>64 It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
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What was the mainstream programming language before C took the lead?
Pascal, BASIC, Fortran, COBOL, and I would even go out on a limb and say assembly.
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Pascal, BASIC, Fortran, COBOL, and I would even go out on a limb and say assembly.
Latest Articles:
A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity FrameworkYou never tried Ada, ATLAS, JOVIAL or hpl? Of them, hpl was my favorite, simply because it drove QC people crazy. With hpl, I could modify the program on the fly, so there was no way to certify that the program that started the run would be the same code that actually executed. Good times! :laugh:
Will Rogers never met me.
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Yeah, each in their own sector. Fortran was never an option in business, Cobol was never an option in engineering. C's ability to knock out Cobol in business has been a lot less successful than most people believe. Even today, Cobol runs a lot of applications. Declining use of Cobol over the last few years (fewer than you would think!) is primarily due to universities not having educated new Cobol programmers for several decades: Those who could maintain the once billions of Cobol code lines (according to Wikipedia: 220 billion lines as late as 2017) are retiring. The needs covered by Cobol are still there. If C hasn't been an improvement for 50 years, it probably isn't today, just an emergency solution. Similarly, Fortran is still a very important language in supercomputing - a revised standard was published less than a year ago. Then again: "I don't know what programming languages will look like in year 2000, but they will be called Fortran!", as old guru Tony Hoare remarked to all the crazy extension proposals for Fortran-77. Fortran 2023 has only vague resemblance to Fortran of the 1970s. IBM tried to make PL/1 a common language for all application areas, including system programming. Let us say that it was a half success for some years - on IBM machines only. (But compilers exist for several other architectures.) In academic circles, a plethora of widely differing languages were known, and taught, in the late 1970s and 80s, such as Lisp, APL, Prolog, Snobol, Forth, Algol68 - all very different from the C family. Especially in compiler courses, students were expected to know a variety of language classes, not just the 'algorithmic' ones. The predecessor of C in academic circles was Algol60 in the 1960s and 70s, with Pascal taking over in the 70s and into the 80s. At some universities, for OO programming Simula67 (an OO extension of Algol60) was essential, but the world in general wasn't ready for OO at that time. Algol68 offered a lot of exciting 'academic' extensions that you might call 'experimental', so it was widely studied at academic institutions, but hardware wasn't ready for it yet, so few people used it for any serious work. C entered academics along with those other 'academic' languages that were not widely used in business and industry, and for several years were not considered a real alternative for production work. The main reason why it gradually took over the scene is that during the 1980s, universities dropped teaching of other languages: People fr
trønderen wrote: Give a programmer of today a program in Lisp, APL, Snobol, Forth ... and he would hardly recognize it as computer program. If you try to present arguments for any not-C-looking language today, you are usually met with a blank stare Reminds me of learning Prolog. The first thing I had to do was forget everything I thought I knew about programming. CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal
"It never ceases to amaze me that a spacecraft launched in 1977 can be fixed remotely from Earth." ― Brian Cox
FORTRAN, ALGOL, BASIC, PASCAL, FORTH. CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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trønderen wrote: Give a programmer of today a program in Lisp, APL, Snobol, Forth ... and he would hardly recognize it as computer program. If you try to present arguments for any not-C-looking language today, you are usually met with a blank stare Reminds me of learning Prolog. The first thing I had to do was forget everything I thought I knew about programming. CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
Dr.Walt Fair, PE wrote:
Reminds me of learning Prolog. The first thing I had to do was forget everything I thought I knew about programming.
Being experienced with complex SQL predicates would be a better basis for learning Prolog than being an expert C coder! (Another language that could give you some basis for Prolog learning would be Snobol, but the number of people having experience with SQL predicates is magnitudes higher. Maybe an even closer match would be XSLT, but I can count on one hand the number of people I ever met declaring themselves to be masters of XSLT. And even fewer who claim to love XSLT :-))
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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FORTRAN, ALGOL, BASIC, PASCAL, FORTH. CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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I certainly would not use the TIOBE Index as a reliable source of truth, though. Maybe it can tell you "something", but to me it appears like self-referencing: The TIOBE Index tells which languages top the TIOBE Index. Like "intelligence" is defined as "What you measure in an IQ test". To take one example: Last month, C popularity dropped by 2.38%, in a single month. No, that is not for real. Popularity doesn't change that rapidly for a well established and very widespread language (unless there are some strong, external factors that has hit the headlines of every software oriented internet publication). The presentation of the September 2024 values states that "C is currently at position #4, which is its lowest position ever since the start of the TIOBE index in 2001." That may be true, but the current reading is 8.89% - in August 2017 it was at 6.48%, that is significantly lower popularity. So is the popularity of a language given by the number of people / projects using it, or by how much (or little) the users of other languages tend to center on many or few other languages? You can use statistics to prove whatever you want. I also question their data collection methods. E.g. entries 51-100 are listed without sorting, so they don't reveal whether whitespace is #51, #100 or somewhere inbetween. Even if it really is #100: I refuse to believe that whitespace really is the 100th most popular programming language. Something is not 100% reliable in their collection of data.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
trønderen wrote:
I certainly would not use the TIOBE Index as a reliable source of truth, though.
Do feel free to provide an alternative. Every other source that I have ever seen was driven by confirmation bias and/or used very small samples. For example a consulting company that specializes in Python finds, amazingly, that 50 large companies are considering starting a project in the next year using Python.
trønderen wrote:
To take one example: Last month, C popularity dropped by 2.38%, in a single month. No, that is not for real
Naturally one understands that a single month is not representative. The trends over time are what matter.
trønderen wrote:
Something is not 100% reliable in their collection of data.
Rather certain that no one claimed they were 100% reliable. Certainly I did not claim that in my first response.
