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I'm still trying to reconcile "most influential" with "nobody's ever heard of". It may be that CLU implemented in premiere some concepts, but if later those concepts may as well just have been rediscovered (like the iterator design pattern) as the obvious thing to do, then what that leaves us?



In this case there's a lot of evidence at least the language designers were paying attention to (Dr.) Barbara Liskov's published academic work over the decades, even if academic papers/languages rarely make it into mainstream consciousness. At a brief glance it looks like an Erdos number game of a sort, in that CLU papers were referenced a lot by other articles, then those articles were referenced by a lot more. There is probably a lot of one or two degree separation.

One specific dot this article helped me connect (thanks article) was that Barbara Liskov of CLU is the same namesake of Liskov's Substitution Principle, which definitely has made broader waves in mainstream OOP consciousness among programmers. It originated in a paper two decades after a lot of the CLU work so it isn't directly a part of CLU's own influence on the world, but it is quite probable that CLU's influence is deep inside the formation/elucidation of the Principle in that Barbara Liskov was clearly thinking about the problem area for decades, and in some cases decades ahead of colleagues and practical applications.


> reconcile "most influential" with "nobody's ever heard of"

We ignore the past. I've worked with people who hadn't heard of Alan Kay. I worked with a guy tasked to revamp an expert system who had never heard of Prolog.


I work with a lot of people who write software and a few professional developers (~10-20 years experience in .NET & Java) and only one of them (has a computer science degree) has ever heard of Prolog and neither had ever heard of Smalltalk, APL, Forth, or Lisp when I brought them up around lunch. They're great at what they do and are much more experienced/talented than I at creating software, but it always makes me wonder why more professional software developers aren't more curious about the past and other alternative solutions. I can tell you how engineers did my job each decade going about 100 years back and how all the tools evolved over that time.


Generics, contrary to common wisdom it was CLU that actually introduced checked exceptions not Java, alongside Mesa one of the first modular languages.




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