>> 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.)

I never saw TP 6.0.

In TP 5.5, they added an "object" keyword, which allowed you to define 
functions and procedures inside a normal record definition. Other than 
this syntactic change, there is no difference in the language. Most 
especially, the method that gets called depends on the declared type of 
a variable, *not* the type of the object in it! (In other words, static 
binding, not dynamic binding.) It also lacks support for abstract 
classes. But does have inheritance.

So it gives the superficial appearance of OOP, while preventing you 
actually programming in an OO style.

> 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)?

It still mystifies me that C provides no way to say (for example) "this 
thing should be a signed integer with at least 16 bits in it". For a 
language designed for portability, you'd think this would be fairly 
basic, but no...

Also, if they had computers powerful enough to run *Prolog*, why does 
the C preprocessor exist?!

>> - 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.

Wikipedia suggests that it was developed specifically for laser 
printing. (I may be wrong on the date that laser printers were 
*invented*, but they did not become common until very, very much later. 
Not unlike C++, apparently...)

>  - 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.

Before the WWW, nobody outside the millitary knew the Internet existed.

In fact, for many years after, also...

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

Figures.

>> - 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.

What do you mean "probably"? ;-) The language is utterly unrelated to 
Java in any way...

>> - 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.

I mean the Internet becoming known by the general public. ("The 
Internet" can be traced back to a secret classified military project 
which was probably around for *decades* before this, knowing the US 
millitary...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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