Summaries from History of Programming Languages on ShortScience.org

History of Programming Languages

In 1978, the first History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL) described the development of 13 computer programming languages, the people who participated in that work, and the context in which it was undertaken. In 1993, HOPL-II contained 14 papers on the genesis and evolution of programming languages. Fifteen years later, it was time for HOPL-III, which was held in conjunction with FCRC 2007 in San Diego. The 12 HOPL-III papers detailed the early history or evolution of specific programming languages. Preliminary ideas about each language was documented by 1996 and each language was in use by 1998.

2007 1

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A history of Haskell: being lazy with class
Hudak, Paul and Hughes, John and Jones, Simon L. Peyton and Wadler, Philip
History of Programming Languages - 2007 via Local Bibsonomy
Keywords: dblp

[link] Summary by AcaWiki 8 years ago

Summary:

Authors describe context of Haskell's creation (many lazy purely functional research languages, desire for common language in genre), key branching factors (e.g., decision of Miranda developers to not allow their language to be base of common language; adoption of still new features of typeclasses and monads), and a number of the design decisions made, and tools, implementations, and applications now available.

Theoretical and practical relevance:

Haskell seems to have had inauspicious beginnings for a widely used general purpose programming language -- design by committee of academics, but through some combination of purity (authors argue decision to be lazy made it easier to stay purely functional), openness (of the design process, specification, libraries, and language implementations), and luck, the language seems to have remained interesting for researchers and become practical for industry, and has also influenced feature development in many other languages.