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Comment by burgerbrain | Hacker News Reader

Curl and Links are web oriented programming languages? As I use and understand them, they are both webbrowsers.... Maybe haven't been keeping up with development..

EDIT: apparently both are languages as well. What retarded naming!

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Ironically, just few days ago I submitted the link to Links programming language here on HN -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2003828

The author put an odd amount of emphasis on those languages. I'd never heard of them, and the amount of emphasis he gave them seems disproportionate to the actual amount of interest there seems to be in them.

I suspect he's not a 'web guy'.

No, he's a Lisp guy, from Boston. Curl is a Lisp programming language from the early noughties by some other Lisp guys from Boston, and Links was, as I understand it, a 2006 attempt by the Haskell guys to bring the goodness of Haskell to the web; Haskell being the language that took over the mantle of Most Advanced Functional Programming Language from Lisp sometime in the 1990s, a title it had held since its inception in 1959. It's not surprising he'd mention the two of them.

Haskell didn't take it from Lisp, and the taking didn't happen in the '90s. There were Hope and Miranda, long before, darlings of PL research.

And the language that took the research baton from Lisp was Peter Landin's ISWIM, and its descendant, the Meta Language of LCF.

> Hope and Miranda, long before, darlings of PL research.

And before them SASL and the Kent Recursive Calculator.

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