Before you think of being a do-gooder...

Peter plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org
Tue May 30 23:26:49 UTC 2006


On Tue, 30 May 2006, Alex Beamish wrote:

>> Python and Ruby (and Perl and Tcl/Tk and C and most other 'common'
>> languages) predate Java by at least 10 years ..
>
> Huh? That doesn't sound right.
>
> Python: 1990 [1]
> Ruby: 1993 to 1995 [2]
> Perl: 1987 [3]
> Tcl: 1990 [4]
> C: Early 1970's [5]
>
> Java: Early 1990's [6]
> JavaScript: 1995 [7]
> PHP: 1995 [8]

Not everything written on the web is accurate. Arguments:

--snip--
/*
  * tcl.h --
  *
  *      This header file describes the externally-visible facilities
  *      of the Tcl interpreter.
  *
  * Copyright (c) 1987-1994 The Regents of the University of California.
  * Copyright (c) 1993-1996 Lucent Technologies.
  * Copyright (c) 1994-1998 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
  * Copyright (c) 1998-2000 by Scriptics Corporation.
  * Copyright (c) 2002 by Kevin B. Kenny.  All rights reserved.
--snap--

Actually the language was written by Dr. John Ousterhout before 1987 
while at ucb afaik. Later Dr. Ousterhout founded Scriptics and got 
control of the language again. I have a nice book here called 'Graphical 
Applications with Tcl and Tk' by Eric F. Johnson, from 1996. In 1996 the 
language could do almost everything it does now.

Same thing for Perl which had a life before it was released afaik. You 
may be right about Python and Ruby. C is almost contemporary with the 
Unix epoch. I understand that it was written practically to implement 
Unix.

For Perl, again looking in the source:

--snip--
/*    perl.h
  *
  *    Copyright (C) 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
  *    2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, by Larry Wall and others
  *
  *    You may distribute under the terms of either the GNU General 
Public
  *    License or the Artistic License, as specified in the README file.
  *
  */
--snap--

which is off a little from the actual date.

Java did not exist as a language outside labs with serious computers 
before sufficient CPU horsepower was available to move the colossus. In 
1995-96 Java would cause a i486 to feel like it locked up for minutes. 
And when it did start to exist outside labs it started changing versions 
twice a year due to the tons of bugs in the widget systems, which were 
impossible to find before it started being used more widely imho.

Peter
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