The Shape of Code

H is for Haskell, HTML and Hack.

In the early 1980s every computer science department with any research pretensions had at least one member of staff who had invented and implemented their own functional language; in many cases PhD students were writing a thesis on some particular aspect of their supervisor’s language. One part of history that is universally ‘forgotten’ is the extent to which languages got redesigned to take advantage of neat implementation tricks discovered by these earnest students; yes, it really was implementation details that shaped the structure of so many of these languages. Eventually it dawned on the academics that perhaps the reason the world was not converting to using functional languages was because there was no obvious market leader, so they did what the commercial world had already tried to do several times, they created a language that was to be the market leader, i.e., Haskell (which has had as much success at attracting the rest of the world as its commercial counterparts). The number of new functional languages did drop significantly, but this was due to a change in fashion and nothing to do with the Haskell work.

HTML is the computer language that most non-programmers have heard of that many developers don’t consider to be a programming language (because it is not Turing complete).

Hack is a language I wrote about earlier in the year.