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Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

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Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#41
post #7
post #5

For those of you finding it hard to read the paranthesis-heavy text, the very last part struck a chord: "If I have to write one more polyglot bash / awk / python script to gather data from log files on a bunch of different machines, demux that into a time-ordered event stream, pipe it through something to munge it into some slightly different format, ship that off via post to some web address and get some JSON back,…

CPAN is afaik the gold standard to make that kind of thing bearable. It isn't really a language thing. (Since everything seems to go to Moose (a backport of most of the Perl 6 OO model) in the Perl world, there might be an impedance mismatch in a few years with old style libraries and new?)

Moose and standard/old style libraries are entirely and transparently inter-operable.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#43

"Somebody do something about this, before I LOSE MY FUCKING MIND!?!?!" Um, what, exactly, is stopping the ranter from doing something about it himself? Is there a law that only people born into a special caste are allowed to create programming languages? Or is he just too lazy to do more than bitch about the world being sub-optimal?

Most surveyors don't know how to actually build the road, they just know which way it should go.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#44

Well, I am doing something about it :-) Look at Babel-17 (www.babel-17.com). It is not ready yet, and for the next few months it will be purely functional, but eventually, you will get it all.

But if I learn babel17 won't I become a traitor!

Of course not, just learn it, then you'll see ;-)

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#45

Good rant, but can we stop it with the "You need to understand category theory to do IO in Haskell" meme? main = do putStrLn "What's your name?" name Was that really so hard?

Yes, it's easy.

(And a few bits of category do help when you are toying around with other typeclasses. Have a look at the typeclassopedia for an introduction.)

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#46
I think one of the big issues with the evolution of languages is the inherit complexity and time commitment involved in creating a language. I'm very intrigued by languages that run on VMs and provide you with an underlying platform to work with. Until language creation becomes a more reasonable task to accomplish, we won't see the the sweeping changes he wants to have.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#47

"Somebody do something about this, before I LOSE MY FUCKING MIND!?!?!" Um, what, exactly, is stopping the ranter from doing something about it himself? Is there a law that only people born into a special caste are allowed to create programming languages? Or is he just too lazy to do more than bitch about the world being sub-optimal?

If he did, he would risk learning why things are the way they are. There's definitely room for improvement, but modern languages have evolved this way for a reason. If he wants his own bloated DSL, then best of luck; but I probably don't want that same language for my projects.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#48
We can all agree that current programming languages have a lot of warts, but then he gets to his list of BARE MINIMUM features a language must have and the rant takes a hard left into Crazytown. Social networks and to-do lists as first-class, language-level features — not even a social network standard library, but a whole subset of the language dedicated to social networks and to-do lists.

It sounds like what he wants is a DSL, because the language he describes would be useless to most people who aren't in his exact position.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#50
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPAN is afaik the gold standard to make that kind of thing bearable. It isn't really a language thing. (Since everything seems to go to Moose (a backport of most of the Perl 6 OO model) in the Perl world, there might be an impedance mismatch in a few years with old style libraries and new?)

Moose and standard/old style libraries are entirely and transparently inter-operable.

Yeah, but I was thinking more brain mismatch. On the other hand, most CPAN libraries aren't so large that they use APIs which needs to be overridden; I was probably wrong. (Anyway, it was irrelevant to my point. :-)
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