Talk:Programming language/GA1

GA Reassessment

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This article has been reviewed as part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Project quality task force in an effort to ensure all listed Good articles continue to meet the Good article criteria. In reviewing the article, I have found there are some issues that may need to be addressed, listed below. I will check back in seven days. If these issues are addressed, the article will remain listed as a Good article. Otherwise, it may be delisted (such a decision may be challenged through WP:GAR). If improved after it has been delisted, it may be nominated at WP:GAN. Feel free to drop a message on my talk page if you have any questions, and many thanks for all the hard work that has gone into this article thus far.

• Significant sections of this article are uncited, for instance Core library, Execution semantics, Implementation, and almost all of Syntax.

• There are three requests for citation, one of which has been in place since February 2007.

• There is one dead link.[1]

• The lead is too short to adequately summarise the article.

• "Programming languages can be used ... as a mode of human communication." Where is this idea (from the lead) developed?

• The lists such as those in Definitions, Usage, Measuring language usage, and so on, should be converted to prose.

• "The rapid growth of the Internet in the mid-1990s created opportunities for new languages. Perl, originally a Unix scripting tool first released in 1987, became common in dynamic Web sites." This is a non-sequitor, as Perl was not a new language in the mid-1990s.

• "... second generation languages (2GL) known as assembly languages or "assembler". This is slightly misleading, as "assembler" is also the term used to describe the program that translates the assembly language program into machine code.

• "Here the virtual machine, just before execution, translates the blocks of bytecode which are going to be used to machine code ...". I think this is at best an inadequate explanation of the significance of the virtual machine, which does not in any case itself perform the translation. It also seems to confuse purely interpreted languages with those compiled to some kind of intermediate byte code.

• Most of today's popular languages (JAVA and especially the .NET languages) are compiled to a machine independent byte code. Platform dependence/independence doesn't seem to be covered by the article.

• "The card deck for an early 4GL was a lot smaller for the same functionality expressed in a 3GL deck." Statements like this one need to be sourced, else they look like personal reminiscences. Also, not everyone may remember or know what a "card deck" is. The statement is also potentially ambiguous, implying that the card deck for a later 4GL may have been larger than that required for a £GL deck.

• The article needs to briefly describe at least the major programming paradigms, such as functional, object-oriented, generic, procedural, and so on, and the language features which support them.

• "The format and use of the early programming languages was heavily influenced by the constraints of the interface." I don't think that makes much sense. The format of the language was heavily influenced by having to represent program instructions on punch cards? More than the format of modern languages is heavily influenced by having to view them on a screen?

--Malleus Fatuorum 14:33, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

• As these issues remain outstanding, this article has now been delisted. --Malleus Fatuorum 17:56, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.