Programming Paradigms and Languages

Programmers are just humans: forgetful, lazy, and they make every mistake imaginable. — Andrej Bauer

• Programming Language Designer or Serial Killer Quiz?
• Programming languages are designed by people
  • lots of languages!
  • each has its own set of idioms, strengths, and weaknesses
  • made trade-offs that impact you, the developer
  • Ruby, Clojure, and Ceylon: Same goal, three very different results, Andrew Oliver
  • Simple Made Easy, Rich Hickey at Strange Loop Conference 2011
    
• Learning multiple languages can help you
  • program better in your primary language
  • solve problems better because you have more appropriate tools
  • "encounter new worlds"
  • Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate (previously run as a House Course)
• Top Languages
  • IEEE Spectrum's Top Programming Languages
  • TIOBE Index of Top Programming Languages
• Programming Paradigms
  • Imperative: PHP, C
  • Object-Oriented: Java, Smalltalk
  • Functional: Scheme, Haskell
  • Declarative: SQL, Prolog
  • Multi-paradigm: C++, Python, JavaScript
  • Polyglot: Java's VM, Microsoft's CLR
• Java Scripting Languages: new syntax to access wealth of Java libraries
  • Groovy: less syntax than Java, cleans up several Java "problems", provide Domain-Specific Languages
  • Clojure: functional, multi-threaded, derived from Lisp
  • Scala: multi-threaded, attempts to combine best of OO and functional paradigms
  • Inspired by criticisms of Java — e.g., none of them have "primitives" or verbosity of declaring types
  • Overview comparisons of these languages from StackOverflow
  • Java.next: Choosing your next JVM language by N. Ford (Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks)
    
• Programming Language Jokes
  • Shoot yourself in the foot
  • If Programming Langauges were weapons
  • Things only developers will find funny
  • 10 Most Bizarre Programming Languages (including Whitespace, but not Brainfuck)
• Contests
  • The International Obfuscated C Code Contest
  • The Underhanded C Contest
• Hour of Code: help anyone learn to program
• Knowledge-based Programming: integrating algorithms with online data
  • Introduction to the Wolfram Language and how it is used to theorize about how to communicate with extraterresterials

Resources

• History of Programming Languages Infographic
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman (considered by many to be the best programming text book)
• Growing a Language, Guy Steele at OOPSLA 1998
• 50 in 50 Keynote (video and summary) by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel at OOPSLA 2007
• The Future of Programming: A History Lesson, Bret Victor at DBX Conference 2013
• JavaFX 2.0 With Alternative Languages by Stephen Chin at GeeCON 2011
• The Effect of Programming Language On Software Quality, Baishakhi Ray et al
• Should Microsoft Give Kids Programmable Versions of Office?, Slashdot