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Programming mavens… are languages potentially immortal past a point of sophistication? Is there such a thing as “paradigm inadequacy” that dooms languages below that point to extinction? Eg: COBOL seems doomed, C and Lisp seem immortally plateaued, PHP is on dinosaur trial…
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Fortran is a good edge case. Afaict HPC still uses high-performance optimized old Fortran code (Linpack is still Fortran I believe?). But at some level this is almost hyperoptimized near-machine-code for core things like linear algebra, with no room for improvement anyway.
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This is a great insight. I’d phrase it as leakproof abstractions are immortal. Disruptors need a wedge between the silicon “market” and the incumbent code. Kinda fun to think of silicon as the market.
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Replying to @vgr
The key imo is impedance mismatch between problem and silicon capability. Zero mismatch between the reality of pointers and C. Near zero between Fortran and matrix math = future-proof auto vectorization. First language to hit zero mismatch for some domain lives forever.
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Replying to
The key imo is impedance mismatch between problem and silicon capability. Zero mismatch between the reality of pointers and C. Near zero between Fortran and matrix math = future-proof auto vectorization. First language to hit zero mismatch for some domain lives forever.
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