It's fascinating to me looking at beginning language guides and thinking "what does this say about the culture of the language"
When I was delving into #OCaml it was (with affection) "here's hello world and here's a dense academic paper on implementing event systems in OCaml 5!"
#Java guides used to be centered on the assumption that you were a web programmer looking to do applets, even long after that assumption died.
#RustLang generally seems to assume a background in programming w/ a CLI.
@hrefna Interesting. My vision of ocaml was that it was a language not too much influenced by c++. It's like every languages made after c++ have standards that are not in the syntax of ocaml. I checked when the first version was mad and the timeline and it made sense. I have to learn it this summer for a course on paradigms. For now I assume that I will not use it outside university. The language is kinda hard to read for modern devs, the package manager is slow and awkwardly not verbose enough. I'm still happy to experiment with it. Your vision on that helps me get a better picture of it.
@jacket I'd describe ML as one of the major "lineages" and one of the branches that is most popular in the math space. A lot of papers in computer science use a pseudocode that derives from ML—especially in type theory—and most of the functional programming languages (or even languages with a functional element) have been influenced by it.
So it comes up a lot, but mostly in terms of its influence. OCaml is one of the few remaining, actively developed, "true" ML dialects.
A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
Languages I've written working programs in: Applesoft BASIC, MS Visual BASIC 1.0, Pascal, DCL, FORTRAN, MUSE, RobotWar and whatever weird-ass macro scripting program was part of the ATEX typesetting system at my first newspaper job. @abucci