Advanced programming languages (2009) • Hacker News Board

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#101

Post by premium-concern » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #75

premium-concern wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can recommend Scala: - It is mature and rock-solid, but still manages to evolve, fix issues and simplify/remove features. Most other languages are purely additive, meaning you will have to carry on all the baggage since the languages' inception. - It is a language which is interested in identifying the best way to solve common programming issues and spares you with all this ideological "OOP/FP is bad" bullshit. - I…

I am not sure about tooling. Do you consider SBT part of tooling? In that case I do not understand how can you say best. SBT is good enough at its finest.

IDEs, editors, SBT, ScalaFmt, Mima, WartRemover, etc.

Yeah, build tools are usually terrible. Being "good enough" is enough for SBT to beat the other ones though.

(Best incremental compilation, fast artifact resolution, reliable dependency management, versioning support, fastest to-Android compilation, broadest plugin support, interactive REPL and project console ...)

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#102

Post by agumonkey » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

MichaelBurge wrote: post #43

agumonkey wrote: post #36

After walking in the land of functions for a long time I wonder if there are advanced advanced languages.

There's theorem provers like Coq. I'm pretty comfortable with Haskell, but concepts like the difference between Propositions and Booleans are enlightening to my Haskell the same way Haskell can be enlightening to use of other languages.

Cool, that's the kind of derivative I was looking for.

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#103

Post by formula1 » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

shrugger wrote: post #76

feiss wrote: post #72

What's up with functional languages nowadays? The exists since the dawn of humanity, but they are getting very trendy lately. Is it just my perception? Is it a HN thing? (I've been a reader for just some months)

Reasonability. In an age where billion dollar companies are gutted by 16yo hackers on a monthly basis, it's worth the effort to build strong, secure systems that can be formally reasoned about.

Its disengenious to imply that functional cant be as insane as procedural. Also, everything is strong and securw until vulnerabilities are found (heartbleed as an example). Its in the hackers best interest to never let these vulnerabilities known. Also since there are many less eyes on less popular languages, vulnerabilities will take more time to be discovered.

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#104

Post by kazinator » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #64

_ph_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course, it is not "untyped". It is dynamically typed.

PL theorists generally talk about whether or not syntactic terms (as opposed to runtime values) have types. Scheme is untyped by that definition.

PL theorists don't get own the definition of what "type" means.

Type pervades computing.

A directory is a different type from a file or character device. A JPEG is a different file type from a PNG. You have MIME types in your e-mail. An ICMP packet is a different type from a TCP datagram.

Machine language instruction sets have types: pointers, signed and unsigned words of various sizes, floating-point values.

"Type" is a very broadly encompassing word. What all notions of type have in common is that it refers to some representation by whose rules some digital bits are interpreted to have a meaning (in some context which somehow establishes which rules apply).

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#105

Post by kmiroslav » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

shrugger wrote: post #74

premium-concern wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can recommend Scala: - It is mature and rock-solid, but still manages to evolve, fix issues and simplify/remove features. Most other languages are purely additive, meaning you will have to carry on all the baggage since the languages' inception. - It is a language which is interested in identifying the best way to solve common programming issues and spares you with all this ideological "OOP/FP is bad" bullshit. - I…

I am so freaking excited about Scala Native. I haven't been so genuinely excited and enthusiastic about something for such a long time, but Scala Native is so awesome. I feel like turning Scala into a cross-platform language is the best idea possible. I'd love to see Scala someday be able to just dump out WebAssembly, or JVM bytecode, or LLVM IR, or whatever the next "hip" format is, while keeping the language the sa…

The size of the Javascript generated by Scala.js alone makes it a non starter for serious projects.

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#106

Post by nazka » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

jghn wrote: post #77

feiss wrote: post #72

What's up with functional languages nowadays? The exists since the dawn of humanity, but they are getting very trendy lately. Is it just my perception? Is it a HN thing? (I've been a reader for just some months)

2 things IMO - There's a long running pendulum that swings back and forth from FP. We're currently in an FP cycle. - Current mainstream computing puts a heavier emphasis on concurrency and distributed computing. FP's focus on immutability and referential transparency makes it easier to reason about these.

> There's a long running pendulum that swings back and forth from FP. We're currently in an FP cycle.

I think this is also happening because Functional Programming can really give us advantages, but also because it is very hard to understand fully (I am looking at you monads). We see how it can reduce: the complexity, the concurrency problems, or how we can code faster with it. But when we try to use it in a production environment, we give up because it's too complex. So you have this back and forth here in the field, between every wow moment with FP being all cool, and then being too hard to "get" or to use in production.

Now I think we are getting there slowly. Trend after trend, we have more and more the main languages that are really incorporating FP principles. And not just as features. Plus many companies are pushing FP languages forward. Swift is a significant push for it that should democratize FP principles to the "masses", rather than a more "academic" crowd.

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#107

Post by kmiroslav » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 6:02 PM UTC

feiss wrote: post #72

What's up with functional languages nowadays? The exists since the dawn of humanity, but they are getting very trendy lately. Is it just my perception? Is it a HN thing? (I've been a reader for just some months)

They're not, really.

A couple of concepts have become trendy: composition and immutability.

The former is certainly a staple of FP but the latter, not as much (a lot of languages considered functional support both mutability and immutability).

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#108

Post by virtualwhys » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 6:03 PM UTC

shocks wrote: post #63

Can someone comment on what it's like building a webapp with Scala/Play?

Unlikely you'll be cranking out a Rails style MVP in Scala + Play, but you will produce a robust, blazing fast, scalable application that's a dream to maintain and build upon.

In short, Play is a really, really good MVC framework. For SPAs you can go lightweight with just Play's router and WS api, or try something like http4s for a more FP-based REST api.

Throw Scala.js into the mix and you've a got a fully typed stack across the board.

and then Scala Native on the horizon...things are looking good in Scala land ;-)

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#109

Post by kazinator » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

klibertp wrote: post #71

rayiner wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PL theorists generally talk about whether or not syntactic terms (as opposed to runtime values) have types. Scheme is untyped by that definition.

PL theorists - from what I saw, not being one - prefer the term "unityped". It's not true that there are no (static!) types - there is a single, unnamed type which contains all possible values.

PL theorists who know what they are talking about know that this is false, because the actual diverse types of those values can be reasoned about at compile time. Such a "unityped" program is made up of syntax. We can reason about an expression more deeply than just "it returns a value" and we can do so statically. For instance in Lisp we know more about an expression like (cons 1 2) than that it returns a value. We know statically that it returns a cons. From that we can infer that (+ (cons 1 2) 3) is not well-typed.

Type isn't just an implementation system; it's how we can reason about the program, as a mathematical object. The reasoning which informs us that (+ (cons 1 2) 3) is not well-formed without evaluating it, has to do with type.

How we implement values (using a generic "cell" that is type-tagged) is just a convenience. We can get things working without being concerned for up-front type checking. It also represents the philosophy that type is innate to objects (not just a syntactic property of programs).

A piece of compiled code can have a type passed into it which didn't exist when that code was compiled, and sensible things can happen anyway.

Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)

#110

Post by kmiroslav » Sun, Jun 19, 2016, 6:05 PM UTC

yawaramin wrote: post #84

eddd wrote: post #44

I don't know much about Scala but Erlang/Elixir fits quite good to the description as well: > Scala is the programming language I use for tasks like writing web servers or IRC clients.

Scala has a very well-regarded implementation of Erlang's actor system. I have personally seen it handle hundreds of thousands of requests spun off as lightweight threads.

The JVM (well, Java really) has been supporting orders of magnitude of that for many years.