Does technology evolve as biology? In many ways, it does. Is it continuous or occurs in bursts? By analyzing the evolution of programming languages with @svalver.bsky.social, we found the answer. Wrok started at @sfiscience.bsky.social. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1... - ThreadSky

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ricardsole.bsky.social • 32 days ago

Does technology evolve as biology? In many ways, it does. Is it continuous or occurs in bursts? By analyzing the evolution of programming languages with @svalver.bsky.social, we found the answer. Wrok started at @sfiscience.bsky.social.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsif.2015.0249

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ecosystemengineer.bsky.social•32 days ago

Evolution manifests in tech and it's made an abundant feeding ground for parasites, prey and predators.

jkone27.bsky.social•31 days ago

Where are Ocaml (and rust?) F# , Elm, Reason, Purescript, standard ml ? ML also has their own family (rust not ml). Just curious why they were not mentioned in the paper diagrams. From an evolutionary point if view the Hindley Milner inference and type systems have quite a special feature?

svalver.bsky.social•29 days ago

Absolutely, we took a close look at this important group of languages. You can check out the paper and the SM for details! Functional languages started off as their own distinct branch, but over time, they really began to influence everywhere, especially as the rate of horizontal transfer increased.

jkone27.bsky.social•29 days ago

does horizontal transfer include "a la ML" automatic type inference? I am no academic or expert, but my understanding is that only certain languages have "smarter inference" and it can never be added to all the others, statically typed FP langs (mainly from ML families + haskell + few others)

svalver.bsky.social•29 days ago

"Horizontal transfer" is the transfer of concepts and ideas from one language to another, usually an unrelated language. We reconstruct the phylogeny based on the list of design influences rather than explicitly investigating traits. However, a detailed comparison can help to answer your question.

svalver.bsky.social•29 days ago

Next week at a conference, I will talk on punctuated evolution; our work on computer languages will be highlighted!

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