I can't seriously read an article that promotes Scheme over any other languages. We had a class in university and everybody hated it. How can you write complex program with so many parenthesis?
Advanced programming languages (2009)
51–60 of 208 posts
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#52Any reason F# is not in the list?
Writing/deploying F# on a non-Windows machine is a huge pain. Been there, won't do that again.
It's not. I actively refuse to use Windows and have never had any trouble installing or using F#. I've only really used it in the last 1.5 years or so, so maybe what you claim was true in the past, but it is not true anymore. There are other reasons to not like it though. For me those would be a lack of HKT and functors, and its primitive compiler optimization due to relying heavily on a VM built for a very different language.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#53what "advanced" even mean? All those languages, they don't do something that others are not capable of(not mention that all the jvm ones just produce bytecode over the same vm)...different development principles is not a reason to call a language advanced.
* A lot of mainstream languages are syntactic skins on top of substantially the same semantics and skill in one is easily transferrable. A person skilled in C should be able to understand a Java program, but may find similarly high-quality, idiomatic Haskell totally inscrutable.
* The number and complexity of concepts with which you should be familiar are much higher. To tread water in most imperative languages, you need to find if/else, while, for, assignment, function call, and function definition. To tread water in these languages, you will generally need more.
* The idioms provided by these languages provide for and encourage code that is more expressive (says more with fewer characters) but may be more difficult to think about and write.
* All languages are equivalent in the sense that you can simulate them all by each other, i.e. by writing a compiler from X programs to lambda calculus expressions, and a lambda calculus interpreter in Y. This result does not imply that you can always express the same concepts in a reasonable, space-efficient manner.
I do have some nits to pick with the list, though. I would consider C++ advanced, in that there is a lot you need to know and think about to work with it.
Scheme itself is very simple: the entirety of its syntax and semantics can be learned by a laymen in an hour, and by the end of a semester first-year computer science students can write their own Scheme interpreters in Scheme. Its complexity is an emergent property of the kinds of abstractions it supports, not inherent to the size and complexity of its design like Haskell or Scala.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#54> It's untyped, which makes it ideal for web-based programming and rapid prototyping. Given its Lisp heritage, Scheme is a natural fit for artificial intelligence. Why does being untyped and having a Lisp heritage make Scheme suitable for these three tasks?
Web based is because JSON is always easier with dynamic types.
Rapid prototyping is because it requires less explicit up front design due to dynamic types.
Artificial Intelligence is because metaprogramming is easier in homoiconic languages.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#55> It's untyped, which makes it ideal for web-based programming and rapid prototyping. Given its Lisp heritage, Scheme is a natural fit for artificial intelligence. Why does being untyped and having a Lisp heritage make Scheme suitable for these three tasks?
> web-based programming and rapid prototyping
Any dynamically-typed scripting language is good for that sort of thing. Scheme in particular is very productive because of its meta-programming capabilities and REPL-based development.
> artificial intelligence
"Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab [...]"
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#56I can't seriously read an article that promotes Scheme over any other languages. We had a class in university and everybody hated it. How can you write complex program with so many parenthesis?
What problems do the parentheses cause you? They've always worked just fine for me and I notice no difference between the programs I can write in Scheme and the programs I can write in other languages.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#57This post is very fortuitous for me. I've been looking to learn a functional language and I had more or less narrowed my options to Haskell, OCaml and Scala. I liked the breakdown between these languages and the resources. Can anyone who programs in Haskell or OCaml regularly tell me the current state of standard and third party library support? I'm very attracted to Scala because it has JVM support, which sounds fan…
Scala's JVM support can get rough. Many a developer had gone down the road of finding a library like a db driver and using it in Scala. This works fine until you deadlock your production system because your execution context ran out of threads because your db driver blocks.
So yes, while you can use Java libraries you often have to jump through a lot of hoops.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#58I can't seriously read an article that promotes Scheme over any other languages. We had a class in university and everybody hated it. How can you write complex program with so many parenthesis?
You're missing out on a huge amount of great things if you let the parenthesis stop your lisp journey. With editor support for formatting and matching they are easy to deal with. In fact the main reason closing brackets are so noticeable in lisp languages is because of the minimal syntax needed. In other languages you need to deal with statements and expressions that end in many ways such as "fi" in bash, the lack of a tab in Python, ")};" in JavaScript.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#59> It's untyped, which makes it ideal for web-based programming and rapid prototyping. Given its Lisp heritage, Scheme is a natural fit for artificial intelligence. Why does being untyped and having a Lisp heritage make Scheme suitable for these three tasks?
Since Strong A.I hasn't been invented yet, I don't think anyone knows which language is best for A.I. Maybe it'll just be something boring like Java.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#60This post is very fortuitous for me. I've been looking to learn a functional language and I had more or less narrowed my options to Haskell, OCaml and Scala. I liked the breakdown between these languages and the resources. Can anyone who programs in Haskell or OCaml regularly tell me the current state of standard and third party library support? I'm very attracted to Scala because it has JVM support, which sounds fan…
Scala's JVM support can get rough. Many a developer had gone down the road of finding a library like a db driver and using it in Scala. This works fine until you deadlock your production system because your execution context ran out of threads because your db driver blocks. So yes, while you can use Java libraries you often have to jump through a lot of hoops.
Scala makes it really easy to call a blocking function using a future with a configurable execution context. I don't see why one would run out of threads. Currently we use the Typesafe supported Slick library but the mechanism is the same.
Maybe I'm missing your point but as a professional Scala programmer I've never run into a problem with Jvm or Java integration