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A Programming Language Underdog

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Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#81

Post by JohnStrangeII »

pflanze wrote: post #59
JohnStrangeII wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried it out and read the Nim book, but I'm not using it for any larger project right now. So here is a biased opinion. Pros: Nim is about as easy to program as Python, has the same speed as C, a working FFI, and all the usual bells and whistles of modern "battery included" languages like a package manager with lots of packages. It is garbage collected, which is good -- about this, some will disagree, of course.…

I'm writing a Scheme interpreter in C++ with the express purpose of easily using Qt from it. It supports call/cc efficiently, which I hope will allow me to write Scheme programs handling GUI ops which use signals/slots behind the scenes in direct mode (basically have (potentially many) Scheme threads of execution instead of callbacks). Another thing that I'm vaguely interested in experimenting with is offering a "rea…

That's a very interesting project. Still, if you're aiming at real-world usage, please seriously consider postponing your own language+implementation (or keep it as a side project) and writing a library for Chez Scheme instead. That would be awesome.

Chez is very mature and probably the fastest Scheme available. It's so good that the Racket team is currently converting Racket to Chez as the backend language and compiler.

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#82

Post by ryanianian »

gilbetron wrote: post #73
fnord77 wrote: post #66

I do not think all this language fragmentation is a good thing. A million little obscure languages that all at the end of the day do the same thing. Yeah, we need language research to keep devising new features and more efficient ways of programming, but this is different. I wish the world would get behind a couple well thought out languages that cover most programming needs (functional, systems/bare metal, scripting…

C/C++, Java, Javascript, and Python make up over 50% of language use. Just use those. Massive tooling around all of them.

This. But also "Javascript" is a way overloaded term. The JS community is quite fragmented. Same could really be said of all of them. "Just use those" may come with a caveat of "also be conservative about what tooling you adopt around the language you choose."

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#83

Post by anentropic »

skellock wrote: post #62
recursive wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this very article, which is pretty light on details, one of the few facts presented is that you can disable GC.

Agreed. I purged a bunch of stuff and still feel like I left too much in. A couple of bonus facts for you: - they've got an effects tracking system where you can have the compiler track (and whistleblow!) which functions are pure or not - their multi-phase compiler allows you to read in source code at build time (from files or external programs!) - their macro system is typesafe as it operates at the AST level - the…

it sounds awesome

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#84

Post by ryanianian »

skellock wrote: post #67
fnord77 wrote: post #66

I do not think all this language fragmentation is a good thing. A million little obscure languages that all at the end of the day do the same thing. Yeah, we need language research to keep devising new features and more efficient ways of programming, but this is different. I wish the world would get behind a couple well thought out languages that cover most programming needs (functional, systems/bare metal, scripting…

See, this is what I thought too. Turns out, by compiling to C or C++, you can use their toolchains. Debuggers, codecov, emscripten...

"Can use" is different from "can use productively." Technically if it's compiled to C/C++ you can use gdb/lldb etc, BUT the compiled version may be so drastically different from the input that it's effectively useless to track down logic errors in the original.

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#85

Post by singularity2001 »

iTokio wrote: post #7
dom96 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might sound strange but Nim is good for everything. From writing backend services to creating web apps running on the client side. I've built emulators, CLI apps, a full blown forum and much more in it. It's particularly great for systems programming tasks that require high performance and zero dependencies. For example, Status is currently writing an Ethereum 2.0 sharding client for resource-restricted devices[…

What are Nim’s main weaknesses?

const hand* ^^ is that a pointer? Are we moving backwards?

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#86

Post by ericdykstra »

fnord77 wrote: post #66

I do not think all this language fragmentation is a good thing. A million little obscure languages that all at the end of the day do the same thing. Yeah, we need language research to keep devising new features and more efficient ways of programming, but this is different. I wish the world would get behind a couple well thought out languages that cover most programming needs (functional, systems/bare metal, scripting…

I think it's great that a lot of these minor languages get some play in companies. If they're good enough to overcome the problems you mention, it improves things for everyone. If they're not, then the company dies and so does an evangelist for that language. It's a little like programming language Darwinism; a few companies need to die in the process, but ultimately it's better for programmers worldwide.

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#88

Post by anentropic »

skellock wrote: post #65
AsyncAwait wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the concept of Nim, as in: fast, statically typed, inferred, compiled etc. but I do not enjoy whitespace-sensitive languages, so am keeping an eye on Crystal more than Nim. If that doesn't bother you, Nim is really neat.

Nim is my first whitespace-sensitive language. I had no plans to love it. We're now engaged.

exactly, they're just better ;)

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#89

Post by gilbetron »

ryanianian wrote: post #82
gilbetron wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C/C++, Java, Javascript, and Python make up over 50% of language use. Just use those. Massive tooling around all of them.

This. But also "Javascript" is a way overloaded term. The JS community is quite fragmented. Same could really be said of all of them. "Just use those" may come with a caveat of "also be conservative about what tooling you adopt around the language you choose."

I almost left Javascript off the list because of it's peculiar (but interesting!), prismatic nature. Still, they all transpile to Javascript (I think?), so really it's all just javascript ;)

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#90

Post by tzs »

interfixus wrote: post #35
nicoburns wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A biggy is that it only really has a single developer, and no big corporate users. And relatedly the library ecosystem is relatively weak. It also has a GC, so it can't be used for really low-level stuff where that is a problem. It's looking pretty promising though. Especially if you are a fan of python's syntax.

Two developers at least. One of whom is in this very thread. It's a concern, yes, but actually has been around for more than a decade, and is showing absolutely no sign of slowing down or going into hibernation. I have just seen a ... competing language team spending developer time on purging the code of what they call ableism . apparently it's now offensive to talk of a sanity check ot to facetiously refer to OCD in…

Which competing language team?

All I found on Google was this gist of someone saying "sanity check" should be avoided. ("health check, too) [1], and some issues and pull requests in projects that were not languages.

One of the latter is clearly trolling to test Linus Torvalds' resolve to be polite [2][3][4][5], complaining about "ableist/saneist" terms, including "silly", on several of Linus' repositories.

You can tell it is a troll because it is just copying/pasting the exact same complaint, just changing the name of the project. It is not even bothering to change the list of alleged problematic words and their counts, so for example it is claiming that perconvert has 144 occurrences of "sanity check" when it actually has 0. In fact every single claim on that one is wrong. The only word from the complaint actually in pesconvert is stupid, which occurs one time, not the six times claimed. Second sign it is a troll is that it is from a GitHub account created just before the complaints were posted.

[1] https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e388...

[2] https://github.com/torvalds/uemacs/issues/16

[3] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/595#issuecomment-4236...

[4] https://github.com/torvalds/pesconvert/issues/4

[5] https://github.com/torvalds/test-tlb/issues/5

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