The Last Programming Language

[@dialNforNinja]

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[@horusfalcon]

So that's why this Antoine guy was always taking things! Why, just the other day he stole my lunch! (Admittedly, my lunch was somewhat less than perfect.)

[@nik4520]

Time for assembly

[@sorvex9]

“If you achieve perfection, then something is wrong”

[@zyansheep]

@@nik4520 assembly is a dsl

[@chrisE815]

They clearly never designed a European automobile

[@sandywyper]

This is the weirdest episode of Star Trek I've ever seen.

[@QuadHealer]

LOL! I read your comment before seeing the whole video, and I was confused, but after having seen the video, I must agree :-) But does it not go beyond just Star Trek - I mean isn't it a sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who at one point? Or am I mistaken? In any case, thank you for making me laugh!

[@EvenStarLoveAnanda]

I know, the ray-gun was a dead giveaway. ;0)

[@shawno66]

This is the funniest YT post I've even seen. I now just say that randomly.

[@Skeeve-Magick]

@@QuadHealer isn't there also Indiana Jones and Dallas referenced?

[@blahuhm6782]

*best episode of Star Trek

[@makinggreatbread]

Entertaining. I started programming in 73 (Cobol, Fortran, RPG, Assembly, machine) and haven't given those days much thought until watching this. A trip back in time. Loved it!

[@bjornkihlberg2103]

If we decide to choose "one language", we're going to find ourselves stuck with the popular option, not the right option.

[@rubenb8653]

ooof this comment needs likes. this is totally true.

[@insertoyouroemail]

Mr. Martin thinks it's going to be Clojure. It's not going to be Clojure. Sorry but if I'm told I have to use an untyped language, me (and many others) will simply take our ball and go home. The idea of the previous generation having picked a language for me to use today is frankly repulsive. I wouldn't want to impose my ideals on future generations like that.

[@rubenb8653]

@@insertoyouroemail yahh but its probably going to be very subjective anyway. I like C for example. gets a lot of hate.

[@excitedbox5705]

@@rubenb8653 C is a great language from the syntax but the feature set is very limited. If C++ had C syntax I would be soooo happy. I hate :: I think it ruins the look and conveys 0 meaning. Like -> or > or even . give you a hint at these things being related. Function syntax with (arg1, arg2) conveys meaning. In C# < > looks aggressive and is pointing away from your objects. _Keyword conveys that there is something that belongs to that. These types of syntax structures are important to make sense even when you know the language so you don't have to think and it makes the code flow much easier. If I told you from now on ? was to be used as a comma and = as a period every time you used them you would have to dedicate thought to that just like a door that you instinctively want to open the wrong way.

[@paulzheng7663]

@@insertoyouroemail You use fiat currency, drive a car on roads, work a job for fiat, go to your doctor to be prescribed poisons, eat food that lacks nutrition, believe what the goverenment wants you to believe .... We have been imposed on. what should we do? WHat will you do?

[@spookypen]

The YT algorithm brought me here, staying for the whole thing. I don't know how to program a computer at all.

[@diamondtroller1253]

rip

[@excitedbox5705]

Never too late to better yourself ;D

[@adamnealis]

Before I watched this, I thought I had at least a basic idea as to how to programme a computer.

[@dewinchy]

That is what I call a tough guy!

[@jomar_macedo]

Almost same thing here, but i've already done some poorly executed working software in college. Not that it made me understand anything here any better, but i'm going for the whole thing.

[@Pariatech]

17min in and still engaged! You have a nice way to entertain and inform that is pretty rare in the IT field.

[@anthonyb9147]

went through the whole hour and didnt even notice it went by. He is great at public speaking.

[@brawndo8726]

43:29 The Dark Knight Falls

[@PatriceStoessel]

seems to fall asleep

[@brawndo8726]

@@PatriceStoessel lol

[@mikhailpopovic1705]

his central nervous system has capitulated ... I feel suddenly to be a flying rodent

[@Rebel101]

Lol

[@darnell8897]

Why do we fall, Bruce?

[@tomrkba4685]

"What have we done with that power?" CAT VIDEOS!

[@TheNortonio]

Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, Fortnite... sad to say. The cat videos are pretty cool though. Have you seen the cat vs cucumber videos? Awesome!

[@arnox4554]

A worthy use of power.

[@strictnonconformist7369]

According to a Seagate CEO, you forgot porn.

[@TheNortonio]

Strict NonConformist anathema!!!

[@lkledu2]

whole data center and infra structure of google to put nyancat 10h (i believe in the day we can do a live for a month only with it)

[@solidstate0]

22 orders of magnitude and humans still urinate in telephone boxes

[@CubOfJudahsLion]

Aside from constraints, some paradigms *did* add something. The functional, for example, came with pattern matching and unification, lambdas (aka anonymous functions) and functions as first-class citizens. The logical paradigm (aside from using matching and unification as well) also adds backtracking and domain-constrained searches. While non-imperative languages may seem academical, the truth is that some of those features of other languages have found a place in mainstream programming, and there are plenty of books about programming "functionally" in C#, JavaScript, Python, etc. It's more likely that we'll build an eclectic future rather than a strictly-imperative one.

[@aoeu256]

I can think of many more paradigms that delete things: total functions (functions must terminate), reversable programming (all functions must be reversable via always returning their input as well as their output), concurrency paradigms, linear types preventing you from duplicating vars, constraint based programming, etc...

[@Ed64]

I love the Commodore 64 showing up at minute “42”. Awesome talk as usual, Uncle Bob!

[@idiosinkrazijske.rutine]

Damn, guys from the '50s were smart.

[@franciscogerardohernandezR1979]

They had dreams of time travel and spaceships, but then the 70s drugs and the left relegated all these goals to fiction.

[@normanhenderson7300]

francisco gerardo hernandez rivera , we’re not some of them under the influence, and were practicing leftist- or actual leftist? This did not necessarily negate the power of analysis in these matters. Although I would not suggest being under the influence of LSD, weed(lab grown especially), and such things. Cocaine, methamphetamines.

[@franciscogerardohernandezR1979]

@@normanhenderson7300 Not only drugs, but day to day financial stress steer people's mind away from noble ventures.

[@PflanzenChirurg]

@@franciscogerardohernandezR1979 it turns out what u own, owns u :)

[@winstonsmith77]

Not all Boomers are bad

[@ericpmoss]

Grumpy Lisp programmer here... Common Lisp "won't die" because it's extensible and multi-paradigm, and not driven by super-cool, super-pure solutions to toy problems. There should be a way to (a) write a leveled Lisp where things like garbage collection are optional, and layered on top of simpler layers, (b) make a processing architecture that lends itself to it, such as cdr-coded caching; (c) pull some of the commercially driven, non-Lispy clutter out of it, and (d) put some big-time effort into improving the compilers and interpreters. For the price of a single stealth bomber, we could do some beautiful things.

[@derekfrost8991]

I love lisp, I use it for my personal accounts etc.. :)

[@UNR3S7]

lisp is eternal for the same reason as emacs. You put all the things into one thing, and have a good foundation at the very core of the thing. And you let people do whatever they want with it. If you have a good foundation all customization leads to realizing the good way. I think that the biggest mistake is assuming that people are not smart enough to realize the good. "you shall not rebind because our bindings are good" well, if you rebind and the original bindings were good then you will realize your mistake eventually. "you shall not assign because it is not pure" well, let them assign and suffer the consequences. Lack of confidence in the foundation is what leads people to restrict branching. (and some business reasons, but business will ruin everything)

[@dejohnny2]

I like Dr Racket.

[@rmsci4002]

Clojure already exists, runs on JVM, CLR. Can be compiled to JavaScript via ClojureScript. Next step is it running on LLVM. GRAAL compiler can help this. Common Lisp is missing this independence/interdependence, VM, etc.

[@vinapocalypse]

@@rmsci4002 Common Lisp does not prescribe which platform it should be implemented on. If you want CL on the JVM there's Armed Bear Common Lisp, but the implementations which compile to machine code are extremely effective at doing so. SBCL compiles forms directly to machine code so you can incrementally develop and compile a function at a time and come out at the end with very fast dynamic Common Lisp Common Lisp is out there and being used, it's just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up

[@joerogers4227]

I am now almost 80. I have a 4 year degree from San Diego State University in Office automation. During my time from 1981 to 1989 when I graduated at age 47 I studied through Jr. College and SDSU many languages. Basic, Cobol 2 semesters, Fortran, Prolog which at the time was called a fuzzy language, RPG II also. My biggest project was programming in Dbase III and iv. I wrote a labor accounting program for Public Works Department on Miramar Naval air station. (NAS). We compiled with clipper and it could go onto a floppy disk. I like that program because it had clear steps and modules I created to do the job. I did my best to not use what we called spaghetti code or jumps all over the place. Through my career I met people who were involved in the computer world as Pioneer's. One was Dr. Hershey and his specialty was fortran and he developed the Hershey fonts. I also meet Dr. Hamming the developer of the hamming code for forward correction of transmitted data. Dr. Hershey was retired from Naval postgraduate School, the Dr. Hamming was a professor there. I like programming in Dbase IV but diskiked working with Prolog as it was not as structured. I remember when I was at Mesa jr. College in San Diego I got one night at 2:00 am and worked remotely on my Cobol program and I got a return message from a tech there asking if I ever Slept.

[@lfmtube]

I watched you video with great interest. Thank you for posting it. I used to work in Argentina with a PDP 11/04 with RT11 operating system. The CPU had 4K memory, an LA34 teleprinter with paper tape and a vt100 terminal. Over 40 years later, I still remember those great days. :) I was 19 years old and working reading magnetic tapes from mainframes and converting into Microfiches as a replacement for the huges printed lists that were generated in those days. All this at an speed of 36 thousand records per minute. It still amazes me how we could do all of that with such limited resources.

[@ww1593]

If this guy was my teacher in High School, I would've chosen a career in Computer Science 12 years ago ! Better late than never.

[@nick18303]

Misael d.w I’m 32 and just started learning this year and I too would have loved him as a teacher but atleast we have him now

[@ww1593]

@@nick18303 the power of the internet and youtube !

[@terrythompson7535]

You gotta love the way this guy talks. He's so excited and optimistic. You can tell he's very passionate

[@terrythompson7535]

@Peter Mortensen The science does not back that up. Now people who understand the release of dopamine and how it aids memory are saying that making the learning more entertaining results in people learning faster.

[@ww1593]

@Peter Mortensen I agree with you but the reason why I made this comment is also becaude of his breath of knowledge. He is the perfect balance in my opinion. Most CS channels are simply career youtubers that what to be celebrities.

[@MotiviqueStudio]

Zen and the art of disdain for everything. Sometimes "we" want a proprietary language for "our" own reasons. So there's a lot that has to happen to get to where a last language is a discussion. Goto line 1

[@monkfoobar]

I met a guy who fixed his motorcycle using the pull top from a beer can.

[@jakykong]

Yeah, I think his argument is fundamentally based on the flawed premise that any general purpose language actually could encompass everything in real life (as opposed to theoretically). Even if you look in the algol-inspired family (of which C is a member - for someone going as far back as PDP-11's, I'm surprised he didn't mention algol. :P ), they express different concepts preferentially. For example, if the problem you're solving is in a domain that is cleanly solved by arrays, you're way better off writing it in Python than in Java. On the other hand, if the problem you're trying to solve is large-scale collaboration, Java has the rigorous type system to enforce contracts, so even though you'll be doing more array fiddling by hand (instead of being expressive with comprehensions and slicing), you can coordinate more developers since the boundaries and interfaces are less fuzzy. Clojure is interesting, for much the same reason most Lisp-family languages are (I'm pretty fluent in Common Lisp); they're good at metaprogramming. That is _why_ they are capable of doing pretty much everything: Nobody writes code in "pure" unadulterated Lisp. They write macros that write code in "pure" Lisp. And those macros are used to define subset languages much more akin to each of the various paradigm languages.

[@absalomdraconis]

@@jakykong : You arguably could make his "last programming language", but you'd have to reject his own rejection of assembly. Ultimately, the "last language" that he speaks of would be more naturally a derivative of Forth than of Lisp.

[@RayDrouillard]

Twenty-two orders of magnitude more power. What did we do with that power? Argue with strangers, look at pictures of cats, and pr0n.

[@qwerty13380]

Have you been looking in my windows?

[@puppetsock]

That is true. Also, much that is plainly trivial or drab. Every episode of Giligan's Island, The Love Boat, MASH, and uncountable hours of discussion of them. Makeup tutorials. ASMR. But also there are: - Google maps - Many many thousands of hours of university lectures on line - Many many thousands of hours of quality entertainment such as symphonies, Shakespeare, etc., on line - Live web-cams of a family of falcolns that lives on an office tower in downtown Toronto - Computer language translation that, while laughably imperfect, can be useful to language learners - Downloadable classic books for free - Downloadable new books as cheap as reasonably achievable and fast - The possibility of learn at home and work at home for a significant fraction of the population Humans do a wide range of activities from the horrible to the exemplary, from the drab to the intense, from the forgettable to the unforgettable. And we starting to do this all on line.

[@mihailmilev9909]

@@puppetsock well said fellow human

[@CitizenOfTheWorld2025]

This is painfully funny as I am also guilty of often squandering this awesome resource by: “arguing with strangers, sharing pictures of cats, and looking at porn.” - trained computer programmer.

[@ShainAndrews]

Adding pet raccoons and foxes. Your comment is two weeks old, we acquired additional resources since then to support it.

[@josephmeditz7956]

Great talk! Interesting, informative, clear and succinct. Who is this fellow?

[@this-abledtheextravertedhe5299]

I’m 50 years old and learning something other than DOS for the first time since 1989 🤣 I choose Python for many of the reasons you listed. I’m off to explore Lisp and Closure. Thank you 😊

[@Evan490BC]

*Clojure

[@Collaborologist]

how you getting along with Clj?

[@billbez7465]

Wow, this is classic. I've been a language junkie for years (actually, a couple decades), and Bob describes this more informative and interesting than I've heard for a long time.

[@robrick9361]

This is like the opposite of dementia.

[@larrydillard8163]

My thought exactly. If you are short on time, he takes the gloves off at 33:20 - and it gets more fun.

[@reallylordofnothing]

This comment is gold

[@Dmytro-kt3fr]

Astonishing video, terrific analysis on the programming, definitely went to a saved videos. Most of us did lost a track of what paradigms and languages are, drowning in the frameworks and tech choice but forgetting the basic ideas behind everything. Will need to prep a "ted talk" in my company covering the things cover by Robert

[@qualia765]

After a bit of though, _I think_ that: 0) This is a very good video that I enjoyed a lot 1) I'm not so sure it will conform on one, but if it does then it will be a very big language in the sense that it can both handle the fine details and complicated stuff as well as assembly, but also the big overview of things as well as python 2) I think that the future is heading in more of a direction of increased usage of multithreading, not as a limit, but as something that is already needed. Due to the increase in neural networks and 3d graphics and undoubtedly others. 3) The syntax will be straight forward, it will run very fast, and running modification. 4) Maily most of the things mentioned in the video should be true, except they can be bypassed so that more hardware-level stuff can happen. So very very hybrid of all things. 5) It will be a textual language. (Although I will still advocate for the graphical programming of textual language.) So thos're my opinions with my limited knowledge.

[@shableep]

44:11 WebAssembly and WASI are the thin layer virtual machine that abstracts the hardware layer (or, "host" as they put it), and almost any language can be compiled to it. All the languages can communicate to each other via WASI. It's a thin virtual machine that invites whatever language that compiles to it to bring their own runtime code if needed. Though it was designed for the web, it was the web that created the excuse for multiple mega corporations to cooperate with each other to agree on a standard language to compile to that would bring more native-like processing power to web apps. That technology is now getting adopted server side, and for many other environments outside of the web browser. It's really exciting technology and I think you should look into it if you haven't already.

[@RuslanKovtun]

Yeah, I'm also waiting for WebAssembly to mature. But I really sold on the point that the code is the data and the data is the code. We should definitely be able to modify the code on the fly (you can remember all sorts of macros running at compile time in rust, jai, nim, etc.). The problem is that programs aren't compilers and they can't produce code other than at compile time. Although, I guess Uncle Bob did logical mistake when he was talking about permissive languages and how unpopular they are and then assumed that the perfect language is permissive.

[@DanielBos]

Yay Forth! I've worked with a lot of niche language, but Forth was the one that blew my mind.

[@Mark.Brindle]

Used it commercially from 82 to 85. Loved it. These days, I would treat it as a high level assembler.

[@DaveRoberts308]

Every programmer needs to wrap their head around both Forth and Lisp. Once you do, you’ll really understand some profound truths about the nature of computation.

[@DanielBos]

@@DaveRoberts308 Haven't used Lisp itself much, but I did write in a Scheme dialect commercially for a few years. call/cc (call-with-current-continuation) is another eye-opener that can fundamentally change your understanding, once you grasp what it does.

[@DaveRoberts308]

@@DanielBos Yep, agreed.

[@ThePandaGuitar]

Dave Roberts Used LISP for years. what profound truths, stop circle jerking. It’s just a stack snapshot. Heck even Ruby has continuations.

[@0xggbrnr]

“But, the materials we manipulate with our hands, the code, is virtually the same...” *Uncle Bob enters the Matrix suddenly and starts listing programming languages* 😂

[@saf271828]

"BASIC ... slow." No. Full stop. I'm not particularly a fan of BASIC for other reasons, but even I'm smart enough to not confuse a language (syntax, semantics) with its implementation (Microsoft 8-bit and 16-bit implementations). The very first BASIC compilers to come out of Dartmouth were **compiled**, not interpreted, and were, bluntly, fast. If you think BASIC is slow, it's because you've grown up using Commodore or Apple II BASIC interpreters, which were utter tripe as interpreter technology goes. Someone who advocates for VM-based language implementations should already know this, and it was a staggering punch to the gut to see this error made.

[@islandcave8738]

QBasic was the first general purpose language I learned. Prior to that, I did have a little bit exposure to the domain specific language, CNC. And prior to that I had exposure to the syntax of Word Perfect 5.1 markup language (I don't know if it is called that, but for lack of a better name, I am calling it that).

[@RBLevin]

Also, Python is BASIC 2020. Do people complain that Python is slow?

[@rameynoodles152]

@@RBLevin Yes. They do complain that Python is slow. Python is INCREDIBLY slow. It's so slow that I don't even know how it's possible to make a language that slow.

[@RBLevin]

Back in the DOS days, I used Microsoft BASIC PDS (Professional Development System). No IDE. Just a compiler. It was fast as hell. A C programmer at Unisys insisted that BASIC was too slow to do anything useful. I told him I could develop a telecom app with it that used Xmodem to transfer files. He laughed. We placed a gentlemen's bet on that. I won. Had it running in no time and it kept pace with the telecom apps of the time (Procomm, Telix, etc.). Doubt Visual Basic could do that today. Another incredibly fast BASIC was Borland's Turbo BASIC, which became Power BASIC. I think that's still around but it never made the transition to GUIs.

[@newstar346]

@@RBLevin There is a GUI version of PowerBASIC.

[@KpxUrz5745]

With all that experience, clearly you are a man who wears many hats, which you changed 8 or 10 times here.

[@abj136]

You missed a major paradigm, that of Excel. It removes the decision of what to update and keeps everything consistent for you. Many programming languages have been developed based on this, though nothing mainstream that I’m aware of.

[@TAHeap]

@@Alex-wk1jv "Excel would be declarative functional logic programming" Weeel ... not really! At least not in a usable way. Now, if you were to add lambdas/binding and some explicit syntax for array formulae, then it might be getting there...

[@karenparker3086]

A lot of this reminds me of physics circa-1880 or so. Physicists were seriously discussing the possibility that there was no more new physics to discover, just applications of existing stuff and engineering. Then along about 1890-95 X-rays and radioactivity were discovered, setting off a wild ride of new discovery that we’re still on to this day. Don’t be too quick to assert that there’s nothing new under the sun, in any field.

[@dontworrybehappy5139]

The new stuff, in my opinion, will be the computer programs doing the programming.

[@normanhenderson7300]

Don't Worry Be Happy , I dabbled in that idea, when I was introduced to the art. I am sure the more sophisticated programmers can accomplish that.

[@rmsci4002]

Those were part of it, but it was the ultraviolet catastrophe leading up to quantum physics that pushed the envelope.

[@rmsci4002]

@@dontworrybehappy5139 that is an old idea... from Lisp.

[@dontworrybehappy5139]

@@rmsci4002 It is a problem that just hasn't been attacked with vigor yet. I've worked in the field of computer programming for decades, and I would guess that 95% of the code being written today could easily be generated by intelligent software created in the very near future. The hardest part of the software would be the interface code that had to interface with and gather the requirements from the project managers (ha ha).

[@kevinfredericks2335]

"time runs in a single direction" Quantum Engineers: hold my beer

[@Dystisis]

The idea of time having a direction is a confusion based on a metaphor. Time is also not a dimension or a medium.

[@cybervigilante]

The purpose of time is to make sure you can't unscramble eggs.

[@Kasas90]

S = k ln ( Omega ). Here you go

[@stefanhensel8611]

@@cybervigilante Time is the way of the universe to make sure not everything happens at once. And space is the way of the universe to make sure not everything happens to you.

[@LaughingOrange]

He said dimension, which to my understanding is true even in quantum mechanics.

[@TuringTest37]

Check out Julia. It has light-weight syntax, is fully homoiconic, compiles on the fly using LLVM down to optimal machine code, interfaces easily with C, Java, R, Fortran and others. And speed? Within 10-20% of compiled C. Often 20 times faster than python for the same numerical problem.

[@galtbarber2640]

Python is way slow, even perl is much faster that python while still being slow.

[@ryanlyle9201]

I'm not sure why I'm here and I don't understand all of it but the personality of this channel is highly infectious. You are a fun guy to watch.

[@jorisherry]

The last programming language will come around the same time as the last spoken language.

[@clickrick]

Pretty much true!

[@1crazypj]

@Deep Throat Personally I've always thought a Mandarin/English hybrid far more likely.(for at least the last 40+ years) Historically, China has been forced to open borders for 'trade' but has always closed them again after throwing out foreigners . Today, they have too much of everything and the technology to do pretty much whatever they really want to, there is already speculation if US could take on a re-armed China (plus, China is where bureaucracy was invented and look how worldwide that is.)

[@homelessrobot]

The observation that paradigms are subtractive does not suggest that new paradigms are always subtracting from the semantic space of the immediately previous generation. You can always go as far back in the stack of historical restrictions as you want to establish a new set. And construction is entirely subtractive anyhow. Constructing a mathematical theorem, you are eliminating all other possible/valid constructions in the theory to say/prove something specific. Constucting a theory, you start with axioms/suppositions who's function is to 'subtract possible preconditions'. When you write a program, you are subtracting from 'the set of all possible programs'.

[@Rfc1394]

At about 8:30 is the statement, "I'm not at all convinced that there are any more surprising languages out there." Reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story of the U.S. Commissioner of Patents who thought there won't be a need for the Patent Office in the future because everything that could be invented has already been, back in the 1890s. We have no idea what revolutionary change we can't even imagine is coming along that will completely blindside us (in a good way.)

[@jondor654]

Perhaps ironic. , notice the playdough .

[@benjaminmelikant3460]

Warning: text wall incoming Reflecting on the idea that we "need to pick a language and all decide to use it across the entire domain", I ended up with a few thoughts. Bob mentions biology, chemistry, mathematics, and others as domains where representation of information was eventually boiled down to a single representation rather than many representations. I see two issues with this. The first is that, even within these disciplines, I don't believe that to be 100% true. I can't speak much of most of these domains, but mathematics is an interesting case in my opinion. Certainly the notation of information for calculus is much different than the notation for basic arithmetic. Yes, calculus builds on basic arithmetic, but most people wouldn't understand a geometric, algebraic, trigonometric, or calculus formula simply by knowing the basic arithmetic operations. There are different representations in each sub-domain because each sub-domain has a unique goal in mind. And this is where my second point comes in. There are so many languages within the sphere of computer science because there are so many different things to express. I have seen it in other comments already, but I think most software developers will realize that the base language requirements for something like a game engine or a real-time embedded OS are much different than the requirements for a web UI. They are all within the domain of software development / computer science of course, but they are all unique sub-domains within that domain. I would argue that there is no such thing as a true "general-purpose" language; that is, that no single language is perfect for all programming tasks; rather, most langauges are, to one degree or another, domain-specific or specialized languages. If we all sat down and decided "okay, our one and only programming language is going to be a virtual machine language" for instance, in what language do we write the virtual machine? We would, at best, need two implementations of the same language; one targeting bare metal so that we could write a VM layer on top of the hardware (or at least a bootstrapper of sorts), then the language itself with its runtime within the virtual machine. The option would exist to move the virtual machine into hardware, but that only moves the problem of needing a "bare-metal" language to the domain of hardware development, it doesn't eliminate the issue. Furthermore, hardware-based language abstraction makes it impossible to harness the raw power of the hardware when you need it; you are throwing out the potential to utilize hardware to its fullest, unless your language does allow bare access to the hardware, in which case I would ask what differentiates this language from something like C, which can be used to write high-level software, but can be mixed with assembly to access hardware features that you may not otherwise be able to access? True, it isn't exactly the same, but I feel like it violates the concept you are going for. Certainly you couldn't do this in an ultra simplistic syntax language. I understand where you are coming from; if we could worry less about such and such language playing nice with this other language and reading source code would be simple because we all just know the same language, we could in some way eliminate issues with compatibility and such, but this is how I see the other side of that coin I guess. I enjoyed the talk a great deal and don't want to take anything away from it. This is just my "other side of the fence" perspective on this issue.

[@bertvanbrakel]

I think we need to make it easier to be more compatible. Our toolchains should probably align more. Look at the state of dependency management. There are so many different tools to do it, and so many ways it's implemented, however at it's core it's a rather simple problem. Either we can come up with a single component to do this and have it customisable per problem requirement, or we break it down into smaller parts and allow easier ways to interface multiple dependency tools in a sane way After decades of programming, I'm still finding one has to cobble together a bunch of random stuff and scripts to make things work together. It shouldn't be such a PITA. There are common themes across all the languages and tools I've come across, and it's always seemed stupid different software tribes just end up reinventing the wheel

[@absalomdraconis]

@@bertvanbrakel : The problem with dependency management is that you need to embrace the idea of multiple sources providing the same resource, which you then have to score so that you can choose between them, and potentially even cause a recompilation storm as your newly installed program or code provides some component that allows the other components which it depends on to themselves provide additional components- people rarely want to deal with this, including the people that should be writing the supporting tools. Among other things, it's naturally a logic language field, and the only things folks are normally aware of in that field are the oft-neglected Make and Prolog.

[@absalomdraconis]

A "last language" could probably be created, but it would fundamentally go against his rejection of machine code. In fact, at the end of the day it would probably be more of a Forth than his beloved Lisp variants.

[@jrherita]

I’m more of a hardware guy with some bouts of programming since the early 1980s.. this is an amazing video and take on languages!

[@rubenb8653]

HMM a dude two, three times my age, just being himself and excited about talking about programming and sharing his lifes experience... Thats definetly worth a sub ^^

[@tiagoweber9438]

Fascinating: entertaining and informative.

[@MarcoAntoniotti]

The favorite language of Italian programmers is "Monicelli". But there is NO way non-Italian programmers can grok its beauty :)

[@rmsci4002]

How is it generally beautiful then if it is limited to some natural language?

[@Evan490BC]

@@rmsci4002 Because Italian is a beautiful language. (I'm not Italian by the way.)

[@Peregringlk]

Gargabe collection is not the only way to completely get rid of memory leaks.

[@ftraple]

Yes, modern C++ does this very well.

[@harrybarrow6222]

You can use (automatic) reference counting, but it is still possible to lose data structures in ways that confuse a simple reference counter.

[@Peregringlk]

@@harrybarrow6222 Or make sure all your objects follows RAII patterns extensively and you're done.

[@harrybarrow6222]

@@Peregringlk Sorry, that seems a little naive. If people were good at manually managing resource allocation and deallocation we would never have memory leaks. 😀

[@Peregringlk]

@@harrybarrow6222 Constructors and destructors should manage resource allocation, not people. As you say, people is very bad on that; me too since I'm people. So C++ tells all of us: don't put never ever new/malloc/delete/free out of these two and you are basically done. There's always exceptions of course because not every single object can be tied or bounded to a scope or other object's live, but the impact is crazingly minified, and without loss of performance (unlike garbage collection).

[@nontimebomala2267]

No way this Computer Scientist is going to listen to this man talk for an hour about ... a topic that has been beaten bloodless three decades ago.

[@Evan490BC]

Yes but you (and me) are not his target audience. Most programmers don't even know what a continuation or a monad is.

[@renderdreality]

I have never seen such a funny programmer and presentation of programming, hahahahaha. I subscribed and added notifications immediately.

[@Cleancoders]

Welcome aboard!

[@dojcubic]

UML for JAVA programmers seems to be his favorite book. He has a copy in every room and the most unusual places.

[@inxiti]

dojcubic I thought the same. I looked it up, and it turns out he wrote it.

[@pqnet84]

@@inxiti he has many unsold copies he uses to keep things from moving with wind inside his house :-D

[@CaedmonWalters]

@@pqnet84 lol

[@JohnSmith-ox3gy]

@@pqnet84 A "paperweight" made of paper. Amusing on two levels.

[@espenskeys]

The code is the data - the data is the code - we used to call that "speed programming" in the Scandinavian Demoscene back in the day

[@horusfalcon]

A great deal of the programming done to control real-world inputs and outputs is symbolic in nature, built in the form of a ladder logic diagram that uses symbols geared originally to be understandable by electricians and instrument technicians. A lot of these symbols are graphical, and their interconnect is very often expressed graphically. This was an interesting "keynote".

[@mrright1068]

What a fun trip down memory lane. Always enjoy your talks.

[@mrspock2al]

Boy do you bring back memories... I'm a new subscriber and a retired programmer. I learned on a PDP 8 writing assembler and something called "Focus". Absolutely hated Cobol. Had to translate it to assembler to understand it. I've written assembler, Fortran, Snobol, Cobol, PL1 (liked it), IBM EDL, Pascal, Perl, Powershell, Basic, C and an assortment of shell languages. Got out of programming about the time "oo" became the rage - and never looked back. My career went into sysadmin, networking and virtualization and loved it. You've got the coolest toys... sonic screwdriver, phaser, communicator and a copy of Forbidden Planet.

[@Blink_____]

The point of the "hot new thing" being decades old is kind of striking, when you consider other aspects of our culture. For the past decade "retro" has been a big boom. Movies and Vinyl especially. To a lesser extent fashion has been coming around too, and I'm pretty sure we are gonna start seeing coke bottle glasses again before the 2030s hits.

[@rmsci4002]

Has nothing to do with it being retro. It is because it was based on solid mathematical principles. Those don't wear out.

[@ilemming]

I see lots of skepticism in the comments from people who seemingly never spent sufficient time writing Clojure. Those who scoff at Lisp because of parentheses, missing the significant point of Lisp. Just listen to any renowned computer scientist and a programmer (of the past and the modern times), be that Alan Kay, Yukihiro Matz, Guy Steele, Paul Graham, John Carmack, or even Donald Knuth. None of them, not a single one of them ever scoffed at Lisp. Those who complain there are no jobs and Lisp is not popular perhaps don't even know that Clojure is the most popular language in its category of programming languages with strong FP emphasis. It is more popular than Haskell, OCaml, F#, Purescript, Elm, Erlang, Elixir, and even Scala. It is being used in production and not for small things. Apple using Clojure (I think for their payments system); Walmart has built their massive receipt processing in Clojure; Cisco has built and actively developing their security infrastructure in Clojure; Funding Circle building a peer-to-peer lending platform; Nubank - the biggest digital bank in South America actively using Clojure; The list goes on: Grammarly, Pandora, CircleCI, Spotify, Pitch, Netflix, and even NASA. Clojure is a hosted language; it potentially can be extended to work on top of any PL ecosystem. It already works on top of JVM, .Net, and Javascript. These days Clojurists figuring out interop with Python and R. There are Clojure-like languages that work with Lua, Go, Rust, Erlang, etc. Bob is right, Clojure has some characteristics of the unifying language of the future. Whatever language you're using right now, I can assure you, there will be some Clojure-like Lisp dialect that can work on top of it, unless it exists already. Do you want to be a programmer, or do you want to be a programming language linguist who has to learn a new language syntax every six months? Like Rich Hickey once said: "Make programmable programs and solve problems, not puzzles."

[@matthoyt3240]

Give you one huge hint where languages are going. Go look at what's been added to Java and C#. Go look at Rust, Swift, and Kotlin. We are slowly marching down the path of ML family of languages (Haskell, SML, F#, and OCaml), not Lisp. Lisp is very good for some things, just like Prolog. What most businesses want is a language you can come back after a few years of not touching and be able to at least figure out what it does, and easy to edit. With a lisp, it could be even more problematic due to the macro system and lack of static type checking. The reason there are lisp like languages available everywhere is they are easy to write. BTW the most popular impure functional programming language is JavaScript by a lot. The most popular impure functional programming language on the JVM is Kotlin. We are seeing a new wave of programming languages due to the multi-core problem and security issues. Clojure is one of the earlier ones. The VMs are actually holding us back right now because the creators don't want to break backward compatibility, which is understandable. Hopefully, this will happen at some point with the success of Go, Swift, and Rust, where a large company willing to take a risk.

[@ilemming]

​ @Matt Hoyt Wherever languages "are going" - Lispers keep innovating as well. It may even feel sometimes that they are one step ahead. Most of those "new features" you mentioned, getting added to C#, Java, Kotlin, etc. are mostly syntax additions. Syntax, interestingly, complects meaning and order, often in a very unidirectional way. Gerald Jay Sussman makes that point in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," the book first published in 1979. And even today, it has not lost its relevance. I have never heard anyone, any single established and renown computer scientist ever (not 40 years ago, nor a decade ago, and neither today) saying that SICP is outdated and shouldn't be used to teach programming. You can argue all day long, about what's better - statically or dynamically typed PLs, languages with HKTs or without, generics or no, etc. But what usually doesn't get discussed much is the importance of the simplicity. And Clojure is one of the very few languages that made simplicity the cornersone of its philosophy. "Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff. The person who has a genuinely simpler system - a system made out of genuinely simple parts, is going to be able to affect the greatest change with the least work. He's going to kick your ass. He's gonna spend more time simplifying things up front and in the long haul he's gonna wipe the plate with you because he'll have that ability to change things when you're struggling to push elephants around." And that's the ultimate truth about being a successful programmer - to strive for simplicity. And again, anyone who feels that programming is about learning new syntax every six months, sure, enjoy your ride. Programming is much more than that though. I'm not saying Clojure is the definitive answer and an ultimate silver bullet. I like other programming languages as well. But you seem to be measuring all Lisp dialects using the same yardstick. Lisp, as you (or most programmers) may have known - perhaps is slowly dying, yes, but more and more Lisps emerge every day. Those who don't see that, are usually those who chose not to care about those things, that's all. Lisp is not "very good for some things". It's not a discrete solution - it's an idea. One of the most magnificent ideas in computer science. And like Uncle Bob stated: "it just refuses to die". Because good ideas are not meant to die, they may evolve, but won't die.

[@KirillKhalitov]

@@ilemming "Gerald Jay Sussman makes that point in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," the book first published in 1979. And even today, it has not lost its relevance". mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/the_end_of_an_era_1/ But I think the book is still great.

[@petersuwara5432]

Bob forgot about Swift replacing Objective-C...

[@johnheaney3349]

He also forgot about Objective-C getting garbage collection.

[@ceedob]

This video is from 2011. Swift first came out in 2014

[@petersuwara5432]

@@ceedob it is indeed! I just looked at the Posted date. So much has changed since then.

[@carsten_]

Objective-C never got GC. ARC is by definition not GC.

[@alexmad69]

Scala is the best: strong functional support for immutability and functions as arguments, parallel collections, implicits, higher kinded types, powerful pattern matching, macros for metaprogramming

[@m.p.jallan2172]

Fascinating thanks. Prof D.Brailsford on the Computerfile series once said that the current low level binary/instruction set design is not likely to change much, already being the smallest way to convey information.

[@jerelull9629]

LISP was SO fun within EMACS: the editor I never has to exit once I got logged in; compile, link, test & debug in one place. I could even do my email without exiting the editor. After all these years, I've realized that every language can do all the same things as other languages, albeit differently. a *REALLY* strange language was APL. very tight, difficult to analyze or debug, which is what I hated about it.

[@dahdahditditditditditditda7536]

Long live the EMACS. Does RMS still have anything to do with it? Been retired for a while ...

[@jerelull9629]

@@dahdahditditditditditditda7536 RMS would be a factor on VAX and possibly Alpha machines. A dozen year ago, before I retired, DEC had an editor as customizable as EMACS, and similarly self-documented, meaning we spent hours searching for features.

[@albertbatfinder5240]

“The code is the data, the data is the code”. Wasn’t the very first great insight the realisation that the code and data could live side by side in the computer, and the second breakthrough (debugging at 3am after the first great insight was implemented) that the code should never be treated as data? Call me conservative, but I never want the code being executed to be different to the code I wrote down. You might as well ask me to feed my code through an Enigma Machine before compiling it. Turing loved to modify a bit of code on the fly. Yeah, and Turing couldn’t see the need for subroutines. Axiom: if you’re settling on a language that Turing would approve, you have definitely gone wrong because the rest of us ain’t Turings.

[@absalomdraconis]

There is some actual value in what he's talking about (aka self-modifying code), but you tend to see it restricted to dynamically loaded libraries (which are so useful that they even existed in the DOS days, in the form of things like overlays) and things like Forth (which aren't really _languages,_ but instead _command interfaces_ that provide some specific language). Self-modifying code in real-world use is very rarified because it's rarely of value.

[@zyansheep]

Sounds like lisp

[@DieterGribnitz]

Wow, this is the first time I ever heard the specs of a macbook read aloud that seems impressive with a reasonable price point. Turns out the trick is to compare it to a 3 or 4 decades old machine.

[@BattousaiHBr]

also, he VASTLY underweighted the CPU performance since he assumed the same IPC (instructions per clock). modern hardware is leaps and bounds faster than decades old hardware even when running at the same frequency.

[@CARLiCON]

Awesome presentation, thanks for sharing.

[@richardgreen7225]

Programming notations deal with different relationship concepts. A typical "language framework" contains at least 4 notations. > Procedure (steps to run when header is invoked) > Data (data-type, data-structure, sometimes meta-data) > input-output (mapping from storage [database] onto memory variables and vice-versa) > format (notation indicates how the programmer wants the data to be displayed) In addition, a framework might also include notations or conventions for: > Build (make) - How to assemble components. > Wiring - Identifies which actors will participate in a collaboration. > Dialog - Given a stimulus in a context, what is the response. (menu, chat-bot) > Plan tree nodes - Given a set of pre-conditions are true, what transitional code (if any) creates a post-condition. The "tree" has a root "goal". Many tree-leafs (threads) of a plan may be running simultaneously. - Almost all of these "notations" can be written in "simple English" - a notation that looks like written English with some structural conventions. Format requires a mark-up notation which allows the "fill-in-the-blank" convention to be expressed with minimal excursions from WYSIWYG.

[@BlackburnBigdragon]

I've always wondered why the industry never standardized computer languages. If you're someone who, with no knowledge about computers, wants to go out and learn programming, you're pretty much lost right out of the gate, because there's so many options. Researching which one to learn is often difficult because they all have so much overlap in features, and purpose. And asking for help is usually worthless because every person you talk to will give a different set of recommendations. It feels like the wild west out there as far as languages are concerned, and it seems that you just have to close your eyes and pick one out of a bin full of them. It's very confusing for someone just starting out learning.

[@YuFanLou]

The same reason Esperanto never took off. Every attempt to “standardize” only creates a new language. One should start out sticking to one language as a “mother tongue”, and learn the so very many other languages as domain needs arise.

[@emzaet391]

Im learning c++ now. it was long time to choose

[@RolfSchlup]

@@emzaet391 In my opinion, C++ is the best most versatile language. It is a compiled language whereas all others require a virtual machine or runtime to run

[@ZeWaka]

@@RolfSchlup uhh, that's a very broad overgeneralization

[@dannygjk]

@@ZeWaka If you had to choose only one language for everything then C would probably be the best choice. I think that was the gist of what he wanted to say. Forth is relatively simple but to use it experience with assembly language is almost compulsory. That would make learning and using Forth much easier.

[@rickmisk]

Any Lisp will do. I prefer the minimalist approach with Scheme

[@cstacy]

I could argue with a few things he said and didn't say, but in the end it would be a Lisp variant, yes.

[@Collaborologist]

Clojure

[@rmsci4002]

Too limited. Clojure is much more practical.

[@andygolem5514]

This is the best episode of Rick and Morty I've ever watched!

[@jamiesaunders3441]

I know absolutely nothing about programming but somehow I sat through the entire thing, riveted. Nice view from underneath as it flew straight over my head.

[@matttrach]

I would love to know how he feels now, 1 decade later. Does golang satisfy all of these?

[@Radioposting]

The fly in the ointment of language theory and practicality could be GTP-3 (Open AI). GTP-3 boasts to write code based on natural language explanations fed to the AI by non-programmers. Do we really want mid-level corporate managers writing code? In the words of Lt. Uhura (Star Trek III), "Be careful what you wish for... You may get it."

[@lfmtube]

I think the path will be in the direction of business specialists writing their own procedures using low-code based services. And true high-level developers are going to write the microservices or modules to use as the basis for those procedures.

[@Radioposting]

@@lfmtube Maybe the new model will be similar to airline pilots. Other than takeoff and landing, they really don't do much other than supervising the flight computer.

[@johnaweiss]

"Do we really want mid-level corporate managers writing code?" No, we want all humans writing code.

[@KentHambrock]

I love how ADHD this keynote is. It makes great points while continuing to be very weird.

[@nikthefix8918]

Yeah he reminds me of Lewis Black the standup comic.

[@ricardo.mazeto]

I have ADHD, and I just noticed after reading your comment how I paid attention to the whole video without getting distracted, which is a rare thing. 😅

[@alastairbowie]

I've had a growing interest in Common Lisp as of late. The metaprogramming aspects of Lisp is quite interesting to me. I also like the minimal syntax and how it feels like quite an expressive language. I've been writing a text based game using a Common Lisp REPL smartphone app I found which has been pretty enjoyable. Cool vid.

[@petermaquine8173]

Hi to all colleagues. I remember auto-lisp (autocad) i use it to make script for plan for french Nuclear plants. I remember turbo-prolog, I used it to illustrate a project for a university. Good all times, because yes it's always the same things that we old dev. are seeing decade after decade. Who remember Fred?

[@maniacal_engineer]

I am glad he mentioned FORTH, I loved forth, which is small and fast and good for things that need small and fast

[@squashtomato]

Getting a "we live in a society" vibe from this guy.

[@Joel-mp2oo]

One main thing I take away from this, is I really need to start learning LISP... Oh and we all need to unite ! 😁

[@AndersJackson]

Start using Emacs, and you are running a REPL with lisp, that have an editor you can configure with Lisp. Then take a look at Magit and Org-mode with literal programming with Babel-mode (extension of Org-mode).

[@Collaborologist]

Clojure

[@Evan490BC]

@@Collaborologist Or Scheme/Racket.

[@bloguetronica]

Props to this man. Thanks to his lecture on clean code, I managed to review a code I've written, break every long function into its components, and now my program improved substantially. I'll apply these principles in the future. They made the code far more readable and maintainable.

[@nycfpv]

IMO single responsibility is the key to building good software. If you follow anything, follow this.

[@you2449]

As a fiction writer (and non-programmer) I needed a programming language for a major plot point in a story. I chose Cobol w/out knowing anything about it. It just sounded right. And now your description of it's weirdness (and absurdity?) confirms it was the right, and only, choice. So glad. (Cuz I wasn't about to go back and change it.) Loved all the rest of this too.

[@utubewatcher806]

of course, Cobol gets bashed--and, yet, every $ transaction; every flight booked, etc, etc goes through a line of Cobol code.

[@you2449]

@@utubewatcher806 That's pretty awesome! Thx., Yet It Lives!

[@TedSeeber]

I learned PDP-8 Assembly, emulated on a PDP-11, with our only attached printer an old teletype. Freshman Year of College. Long before OO, I was doing polymorphism in 6502 assembly on the Apple IIe. It was a neat way to get software sprites on a machine whose high resolution mode was just another memory space.

[@teeesen]

Talking about syntax is missing the point. The really important issues are semantic and pragmatic. But, since Uncle Bob brought up graphical languages and argued that, since programming is sequential, programs should be textual, let me ask you all this: Do you really think of your programs as being fundamentally sequence of characters? (Or as sequences of lines, each of which is a sequence of characters, if you don’t think of newlines as characters. Or as a collection of files, each of which is a sequence of lines of characters, if you want to bring separate compilation units into it.) Please reply: I’m genuinely interested. When I write a program, I think of it as a tree of declarations, expressions, and commands that is (awkwardly) encoded as a sequence of characters. Scratch and similar languages may seem like they for beginners only, but I think they may point the way to more effective syntax in the future. If you truly think of your program as a sequence, why do you indent your code? [By the way, Uncle Bob: thanks for mentioning Prograph. I worked on an early implementation. Unfortunately, I never got to use the commercial version, since I didn’t have a Mac at the time. I think if they had come out with a Windows version early enough, it would have lasted longer and had more influence.]

[@hardlyb]

I think of my program first as a collection of operations, which happen to be expressed in whatever language I'm using. (I once worked on a project where I was simultaneously programming in Smallltalk, C/C++, and a dialect of Lisp, for different parts of the project, and I would occasionally get confused about which language I was using at the moment.) To me, the semantics of what I'm doing are far more important than the language, but I do get frustrated with how verbose and clunky some languages are while I'm coding (e.g. Java, which I'm using at the moment), and then how inefficiently they compile when I'm trying to get things to perform as I wish (e.g., Python, Javascript). Overall, I prefer various Lisps that I've used, but only because of the incomparable power of the macro facility in those languages. (I'm on the fence about functional vs object-oriented languages, and I dislike languages with a lot of syntax, like C++ - I'd prefer to create my own syntax for the task at hand, rather than trying to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the language designer - e.g., Python, again).

[@teeesen]

hardlyb thanks for your comment . Further thought on this. The idea that language paradigms take things away from us is an interesting one. Compared to assembler, Fortran took away the ability, for example, to make certain type errors. For example in Fortran it’s difficult to assign an Integer to a location that is meant to hold an address. (C made that easy again!) Graphical languages take away the ability to make syntax errors. That’s sort of a trivial example, but it’s hard to argue that we will miss syntax errors. Uncle Bob asked what’s left to take away? I would say semantic errors. There are languages now that won’t compile if the code contains semantic errors. Dafny is an example. Just like adding type decorations is the cost that we pay to avoid type errors you have to make semantic declarations In order to avoid semantic errors. But in certain application areas this is worth it.

[@hardlyb]

@@teeesen There are still logical errors, which no language will prevent, so we won't have any shortage of errors to make.

[@Alkis05]

@@teeesen The idea of imposing a discipline to make life easier is all over engeneering. Take the lumped-matter discipline in eletronics for example. It allows for the simplification of maxwell equations into much simplier kirchhoff's laws for circuit analysis. Or LTI system in signal analysis and control theory. The understanding that comes from a simplier model often out weights the precision that comes from a more precise but complex one. One thing that he didn't take into account, though, is that these languages are good for general purpose computers. But we will see in the future the proliferation of embeded smart systems, ever more miniaturized that will be comunicating with each other. And we will be dealing again with hardware restrictions that we are not used to in desktops and servers. So low level languages like rust and C will continue to have a space, it's my guess. On the other hand the other hand, how are current computer languages far in quantum computing? I know that lisp is popular with this people because the language is pretty flexible and you can basically invent a new language with lisp.

[@teeesen]

Alkis05 Good points. Abstraction has been around for a long time. Regarding networks of small computers: perhaps we need to think less about programming computers and more about programming networks of computers. Quantum computing is a whole other thing; our current mainstream languages are not suitable, I think. In the 70s and 80s there was a lot of research on automatic parallelization; the idea being to take code written for one computing paradigm (sequential code for sequential computers) and turn it into code for parallel machines. Perhaps it will be possible to have automatic quantumization which will allow people to write programs for the classical paradigm but execute them on quantum hardware. So far, I think we are nowhere near being able to do that.

[@cybervigilante]

As long as it's not Java. "It's Tuesday. Let's make a new language."

[@michaeladair6557]

Legit O.G. Nerd, I love this guy. Did you see the batman suit in the background! Subscribed!

[@bhangrafan4480]

For some decades I had understood that the next development in computing was going to be increasingly parallel architectures which would require some new innovations in programming for greatly parallel processing.

[@StephenCoda]

One thing that always stands out to me in arguments about languages is that different domains favour different paradigms. Game devs in general don't go in for Haskell, I don't even know where I'd begin writing something like star craft in that language at least not with bearable performance. But Haskell clearly has it's fans. I think a language that allows you to choose the paradigms you want to operate under is the way forward. Lisp seems to do that. Even Clojure, arguably purely functional variant, still has facilities to allow mutable state. Another example of a language giving you a safe word when you want to escape paradigm bondage is Rust, which gives you the option to declare an area of code unsafe when you want to start messing directly with memory even though its stated goal is to stop you doing unsafe things with memory. Maybe we shouldn't generally use goto but someone somewhere might really find themselves in need of it (probably writing for some embedded system that has egg noodles for ram).

[@ffggddss]

The only language I've encountered that I didn't hear him mention, is Ada. Or did he, and I missed it? "Anybody remember core [memory]?" Yes! And while I can't say I remember this, my dad related to me a time *_before_* there was core memory! (He got to do some thesis work on Johnny von Neumann's computer, ca 1950-51. I was just a toddler.) Fred

[@WilliamHostman]

I remember a number of odd things that are older than me... like rope memory and core memory. And the need to refresh them. I also remember typing punch cards for college students when in Jr. High, because the only time the thing was free was during their classes. I know that the average digital watch these days has a better CPU than my TS-1000....

[@ffggddss]

@@WilliamHostman To be clear, I wasn't saying that I remember things that are older than me; core memory came into being when I was alive, but too small to know what a computer even was. The first computer my dad worked on, before core memory existed, had some way of using a grid of "pixels" (not a term that existed then) on a CRT screen as random-access memory. I never quite understood what he was describing, but one of its pitfalls was that when some part of that screen got "burned in," you had to write your program so as to avoid that region of memory! My own first use of a computer was in college, when you typed your program on punch (Hollerith) cards, submitted your "deck," and hoped your output, on 14"(or 17"?)-wide track-feed computer paper, would arrive for pickup outside the computer room in a day or two. Fred

[@NUCLEARARMAMENT]

@@ffggddss It sounds like Williams Tubes to me.

[@WilliamHostman]

@@ffggddss Most of us remeber things from before our birth - because we have this thing called language, which allows us to share experiences we weren't present for. Like remembering that George Washington was one of the first US general officers. Video has made that even better than language alone. Remembering those isn't abnormal... at least not since the 1930's.

[@ffggddss]

@@WilliamHostman I adopt a narrower meaning of "memory." What you're describing, I would call a memory of hearing or reading or seeing a video or movie about it, not actually remembering the thing itself. Fred

[@dukeofearl8078]

I must disagree with forced garbage collection. Such a language would not meet the requirements of real time apps (and possibly not embedded apps). I also disagree that compiled languages bind us to the hardware. The ultimate language needs to be compiled to machine code to run efficiently on shared processors (eg containers). D and Rust are the best fits I’m aware of.

[@emmetallen5685]

Maybe something like a superset of rust? I think something like this would check off most of the boxes.

[@hemangandhi4596]

@@emmetallen5685 what would you add to Rust in the superset? A build target for the JVM?

[@alienm00sehunter]

Something like rust might be the alternative for programs that can't handle a vm

[@AndersJackson]

You are talking about OCaml now, you know. It compiles to native or virtual machine, and to JavaScript and much more. It is garbage collected, but run on small machines like Arduino's. It is also basis of operating system, or actually, the program IS the operating system. You boot into your program. It is functional programming language, and has Object oriented extension (but hardly ever used). It also have extensions to the syntax, so you can in a standard way hack in new syntax structures into it. Like a pre-processor, written in OCaml, which changes the AST with the pre processor, not the text.

[@hemangandhi4596]

@@AndersJackson Rust has all of that too. Also, when do you boot into OCaML? I've never seen heard of it. But welp, I guess you could tweak the OCaML compiler to stack allocate most things and ref-count to basically make it close to GC-free too, if that was necessary (I think the optimizations for math lead to something like this?)

[@dougb70]

49:47 Life is massively parallel. Biotech is developed in parity. CPUs have potentially thousands of cores. The next language should align with that goal. So the talk about linearity lacks foresight IMHO.

[@antonnym214]

Thank you! Bob, you are a national treasure! I started on the TRS-80 in 1977 with BASIC, Z80 and APL. (Yes, APL on the TRS-80!) then I wrote a language called R-code to control multiple "warbots" fighting each other in a virtual maze). Then I wrote a simplified Structured BASIC-like language called L.I.M. (Limited Instruction Model OR Less Is More). I'm convinced simple is best, even if it is less impressive to coders and their friends.

[@frankgerlach4467]

Note that Semantics is much more important than Syntax. There are many ways to say the same thing, but there are very few constructs around: loops, conditionals, structures, arrays, pointers, lambdas etc.

[@handris99]

I remember him saying elsewhere that "in the end we are all going to be programming in LISP" :) Edit: Just finished the thing. Looks like the apple didn't fell far from the tree xD Clojure it is for now. I should take a look at it.

[@absalomdraconis]

I'll make a prediction now: in the end, even if what we program in acts similarly to LISP or Clojure (which it probably won't in important ways), it'll look like C. Some people say that syntax is a solved problem and not an issue, but it is quite clear that the solution in question does _not_ look like Lisp.

[@thebutlah]

I wonder if Rusts notions of lifetimes and ownership baked into the language itself instead of as convention would count as a "new thing"

[@driftonAloft]

not really, its a paradigm of rust an enforcement of rules

[@duffahtolla]

It's core to the language and it's a severe constraint. So I would think yes. Just as capabilities are for Pony.

[@NiktNobody]

We will need new paradigms and new programming languages for new computers. For example, for quantum computers.

[@elcugo]

There is no evidence that quantum computers are more powerful than Turing machines. We will probably need DSL for them, however.

[@eventhisidistaken]

Fundamentally, you need to be able to set the state of qubits, and read them. I view quantum computers in the same way I view graphics hardware. You have special code you write to run on the hardware, controlled by general purpose code. It might be kind of like cuda or a shading language - yes you need to write some parts in some special language, but a general purpose language is still in control.

[@smestre]

@@elcugo You are right in that there is no proof that quantum computability is different from regular old computability. But there are some problems for which we know linear time solutions in quantum computers, but only exponential time solutions on traditional computers. computers

[@taragnor]

@@elcugo : The very nature of what quantum computers can do makes them more powerful than Turing machines. Shor's Algorithm is one good example of a quantum machine beating the hell out of a standard computer. Really the main limit of quantum programming is coming up with quantum algorithms to take advantage of all the amazing speed you can get, because programming things in quantum is far harder than writing a normal algorithm.

[@rmsci4002]

There are already people arguing that Lisp is the most suitable language for quantum computing.

[@mattsimon4167]

For a good example of graphical/module there is Verilog and VHDL and it can program FPGAs. though they are both electronic and domain specific, and progress there is being focused on abstracting the graphical to traditional text language.

[@davisgloff]

I'm not a programmer (at all,) but I was fascinated by this.. I kept hoping there would be something I understood. There wasn't, and just that fact kept me watching and interested... By the way, regardless of my ignorance, I LOVE your presentation!!

[@joaquinfabrega]

I am not involved in programming, however I found this video interesting.

[@Cowboy8625]

I was wondering why Rust wasn’t mentioned or Zig but I then noticed it was made in 2011. I’d like to know what you think of these languages.

[@CynHicks]

I was wondering how a guy that was coding in the 60s could look a decade younger than he is. Lol

[@rmsci4002]

Rust is just a safer C++ with functional possibilities, built on top of LLVM. All of these language eventually converge towards being some variant of a Lisp language.

[@HermanWillems]

@@rmsci4002 Lisp is nice, but why the heck all these functional languages needs a fucking garbage collector. I hate that. We should NOT use garbage collectors, and if we want automatic memory for certain algorithms to be faster we should use arena's for those small usecases.

[@AllanKobelansky]

This guy is way smarter than he looks. Outstanding presentation. Best 53:16 I've spent in a very long time.

[@maiaallman4635]

I'm so glad I found your channel!

[@MichaelLehnGermany]

My generation started programming in Pascal. It was a simple language designed for teaching the essential concepts in programming (and I think we currently don't have an adequate teaching language as replacement). With that knowledge it was simple to quickly learn other languages. And learning different languages was considered to be a good thing. We were told (and I still agree today) "You have to use the right tool for a job", "You have to learn how to figure out what the right tool is for a job", "you have to learn how to learn a new programming language", etc. The goal was to teach adaptivity and flexibility. So now it seems the goal is to raise armies of one trick ponies.

[@alexisandersen1392]

43:42 RIP Batman.

[@SimGunther]

44:04 I'm with the crowd on this one. The "write once, run everywhere" philosophy is ironically antiquated given that we're supposed to "run away from the hardware". GC without a large amount of lag or spike in compute time they has a smaller footprint than manually managed memory is a noble goal, but I'll stick with play in my pointer garden without a VM, thx. :) P.S. you still can get memory leaks in a garbage collected language, like WTF??

[@homelessrobot]

and even if you could completely eliminate memory leaks, memory is just a special case of resource management. there is no general strategy for automatic resource management. its basically the halting problem.

[@oysteinsoreide4323]

C# has a big advantage since it is compiled to intermediate language, and compiled to native machine code on the machine running the code.

[@oysteinsoreide4323]

SimGunther Garbage collection saves also things. But there are ways to optimize garbage collection.

[@oysteinsoreide4323]

SimGunther Yes GC is not a way to say that you don't have to think about resources. GC don't save bad code.

[@homelessrobot]

@@oysteinsoreide4323 the problem comes when you write a thing that is isomorphic to dynamic memory allocation, but its too abstracted from memory primitives for the garbage collector to infer this. Or, when something about your memory usage patterns prevents the freeing of memory from actually leading to being able to use the memory again later (memory fragmentation, generally). GC is /supposed/ to be a way to say that you don't have to think about memory management; but even this isn't really true.

[@Alkis05]

12:15 dwarf fortress hydraulic computer is turing complete. They implemented space invaders in dwarf fortress.

[@dale116dot7]

My favourite programming language is assembly. Grew up on 6502 assembly. Moved to 68HC11 and 68HC08. Still program lots of assembly on MC9S08 and MC9S12.

[@valdisk3502]

Some salient features missing from Bob's talk: delimited continuations (Scala), Communicating serial processes (Go), sparse memory (human brain). These are all great features that are not mere restrictions on the venerable omnipotent LISP. Sparse memory also manifests itself as content-addressable storage, just wait for my Web3 platform to see. Also, I have two meta-features up the sleeve, one for processors (microcode-level programming) and one for the language AUM, my last language candidate, which offers order-of-magnitude more freedom than ML. In AUM, you can define 2+3 to mean: take the character "+", repeat three times and call the duplication function (called "2") on it, producing the two-element list ("+++" "+++"). It is supposed to be as fast as C after compilation, but more compact, both the binaries and the source. There is still room to improve the syntax and functionality of current languages, I am willing to share my research with qualified partners.

[@ElixirVitae]

I’m very intrigued by your comment. Can you tell me more about what you are doing and where I can go to learn about your work?