Four Languages from Forty Years Ago
summary
Survey of four 1970s languages shows concrete lessons: SQL is a expression-based set model with declarative queries, separable DDL/DML and interactive tuning; Prolog stores facts and rules and uses bi-directional unification to backtrack and solve constraints (Sudoku in eight lines); ML gives type inference and composable algebraic types (discriminated unions) so domains become executable documentation; Smalltalk makes everything-is-an-object, provides a live image/IDE, in-place debugging and on-the-fly class creation. These tools change how problems are modeled and built.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Start
- 2:06The 1970s
- 9:19The most important programming paradigms
- 11:17The most popular programming languages
- 19:09SQL Separation of concerns
- 22:53Prolog uses unification
- 24:38Datalog example
- 25:46Bi-directional unification is awesome
- 36:20Different defaults
- 42:26What can we learn from ML?
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