Invisible schrieb:

> When the C64 was designed, extremely powerful languages such as List, 
> Prolog, Smalltalk and even Pascal were already decades old. And yet, the 
> C64 came with... BASIC?

Sure.

Home computers called for a language with the following features:

- Interpreted (to be able to double-act as a "shell")
- Low memory footprint (to fit in the limited ROM and RAM)
- Shallow learning curve (to give users a false sense of being computer 
experts)

And once Commodore had established BASIC as the de-facto standard for 
home computers, the case was settled anyway.


> Even as Borland released TurboPascal 5.5 for DOS [that's the one with 
> the object-oriented extensions which aren't actually object-oriented], 

 From what I remember, I'd disagree. (Then again, maybe there was a 
difference between TP 5.5 and TP 6.0; I only really used the latter; and 
TP 3.something earlier.)


> - C and Prolog appeared at the same time. This doesn't make a lot of 
> sense. C is a crude, simplistic low-level bit-twiddling langauge, while 
> Prolog is a powerful high-level logic manipulation language. If there 
> were computers capable of running Prolog, why did C need to exist?

Maybe simply /because/ Prolog was such a high-level language, and didn't 
fit all applications? Like, for instance, writing a Unix kernel (which 
is what C was initially invented for)?


> - SQL existed 15 years before high-capacity storage devices appeared. 

This is somewhat unsettling indeed.


> - PostScript was invented 10 years before laser printers existed. (It 
> was apparently designed specifically with laser printers in mind, as I 
> had always believed.)

You're wrong here: The first laser printer dates back to 1969, while 
even the roots of PostScript date no further back than 1976. 
Furthermore, the language was initially targeted at the offset printing 
industry to drive Computer-to-Film imagesetters, and was only later 
adapted to laser printers.


  - Perl predates the Internet by half a decade. (WTF?) I can only imagine
> it began life as a Unixy text-munging system in the style of awk, sed, etc.

You surely mean it predates the /World Wide Web/ by half a decade.

According to Wikipedia, it was indeed developed (at NASA, btw) as a Unix 
tool for report processing.

> - JavaScript predates Java. (WTF?!)

... under the titles "Mocha" and later "LiveScript", yes. The name 
JavaScript wasn't coined until December 1995 - when Java was already 
released to the public (not in 1996, as your chart implies) - probably 
in an attempt to benefit from the Java hype of those days.


> - Visual Basic is significantly older than Delphi.

No surprise here; Delphi was actually Borland's attempt to regain market 
shares, after Microsoft's success with their BASIC dialect and IDE, 
which first introduced (at least to the masses) the concept of a "GUI 
modeller" that allowed to visually edit an application's graphical user 
interface instead of generating it programmatically.


> - Ruby, PHP and JavaScript were all around at the same time as Delphi. 
> This is puzzling because when Delphi was new, the Internet didn't really 
> "exist" yet.

Again, I guess you mean WWW, not internet.

And yes, it did exist already, although in this case Microsoft was just 
appearing on the scene; the first graphical web browser, NCSA Mosaic, 
had been released two years earlier already, and the WWW was already all 
the rage by 1995.

The WWW itself actually dates back to 1991, when it was still text-based.

(As for PHP, it should also be noted that back in 1995, when it was 
first released, it was not much more than a toolset written by the 
author to manage his own personal homepage.)

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