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Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

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Re: Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

#41

Post by strlen »

leif wrote: post #26

I had guessed this was about clojure before I followed the link, somehow, I think because in part, I feel the same way. Is this common? Anyone else feel like clojure is, or is on the path to becoming, the perfect language? I won't say I'll never need anything else or will stop learning new languages, but it feels...complete. I still use C for algorithmically simple, memory- and time-sensitive tasks, and I still use p…

You don't need to fully understand Scala's type system to write working code in it. The features like Higher Kindred seem intimidating, but you only have to deal with them as a library implementer (and in many cases the syntactic sugar e.g., %> helps gloss over a lot of it).

Unlike with Haskell, type classes ("Higher-Kindred types" in Scala) are just one way to have a certain kind of polymorphism, you also have a more traditional type of polymorphism through traits and sub-classing.

Re: Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

#42

Post by astrange »

metamemetics wrote: post #35
adimitrov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good enough" is a curious notion. I'm an advocate of "good enough" is good enough, but sometimes it can be quite tricky to decide when something is good enough. And if . Sometimes, you figure it out down the road; and you'll be in deep trouble if you find out it wasn't! Anyhow, there have been many "good enough" languages — mostly, it depends on cultural factors. Latin is still present in today's traditional science…

English is and will be the de facto language of globalization. All of the world's elites speak it in every country. People will speak their local language, AND English. I think this is a given. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk English will certainly outlast Chinese. The constitution of India is written in English and India will soon far eclipse China in terms of population. I think it's a given, is assumed…

> What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions.

These two sentences have no apparent relation, except that you said they did. Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions. Also, spoken languages don't have punctuation…

Re: Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

#44

Post by silentbicycle »

astrange wrote: post #42
metamemetics wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is and will be the de facto language of globalization. All of the world's elites speak it in every country. People will speak their local language, AND English. I think this is a given. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk English will certainly outlast Chinese. The constitution of India is written in English and India will soon far eclipse China in terms of population. I think it's a given, is assumed…

> What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions. These two sentences have no apparent relation, except that you said they did. Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions. Also, spoken lang…

I think (s)he's saying that human languages have composable, tree-like structures. There's nothing Lisp-specific about that, though. Prolog would work just as well, or ML (human languages may be statically typed), Joy, etc.

Also, I'm an amateur linguist at best, but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily.

Re: Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

#45

Post by cylinder714 »

johnmw wrote: post #38

>And LISP, as it turns out, isn’t a programming language. LISP is a way of mind. I wish could find a good post that doesn't just say this, it really makes me get it . Any suggestions? Edit: Thanks unoti - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1845104 , I'm going to be reading this next http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

I like to refer people to The Road to Lisp Survey Highlight Film (http://wiki.alu.org/rtl_highlight_film). If it's down, Google for the cached version.

Re: Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

#46

Post by bad_user »

metamemetics wrote: post #35
adimitrov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good enough" is a curious notion. I'm an advocate of "good enough" is good enough, but sometimes it can be quite tricky to decide when something is good enough. And if . Sometimes, you figure it out down the road; and you'll be in deep trouble if you find out it wasn't! Anyhow, there have been many "good enough" languages — mostly, it depends on cultural factors. Latin is still present in today's traditional science…

English is and will be the de facto language of globalization. All of the world's elites speak it in every country. People will speak their local language, AND English. I think this is a given. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk English will certainly outlast Chinese. The constitution of India is written in English and India will soon far eclipse China in terms of population. I think it's a given, is assumed…

If I'm hungry I would say "Hey, give me a Hot Dog".

I wouldn't be drawing diagrams of synapses and how the chemical signals flow when I'm thinking about that Hot Dog.

The issue of language parsing and how Lisp-like it is, it's incredibly irrelevant.

Re: Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

#47

Post by metamemetics »

astrange wrote: post #42
metamemetics wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is and will be the de facto language of globalization. All of the world's elites speak it in every country. People will speak their local language, AND English. I think this is a given. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk English will certainly outlast Chinese. The constitution of India is written in English and India will soon far eclipse China in terms of population. I think it's a given, is assumed…

> What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions. These two sentences have no apparent relation, except that you said they did. Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions. Also, spoken lang…

> Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions

I tried to clarify the proper analogy at the end. LISP is not directly analogous to spoken language (the surface level), LISP is directly analogous to human thought (that interprets language internally). This was really the topic for an article and not a comment rant, sorry.

Re: Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

#48

Post by aaronblohowiak »

tiles wrote: post #16
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #14

> Because, you see, as soon as I saw Java, I knew I hated it. I have never written even a single line of Java code, not for money, and definitely not for fun. I think that I already knew, deep down, that it would change me, as a coder. For the worse. That's just like how I've never been to Argentina, but I saw a picture of it in a magazine and knew for sure that I would hate the country. I had a feeling deep down. /s…

Except Java has a poor reputation (on the "fun to program in" scale) and not much in the way of intellectual growth for a programmer (in terms of new, effective paradigms for coding). This is a generalization of the opinions I've read about it, in addition to my own experience. It's like hearing all your friends saying how much they hated Argentina, and how you would too. They might be wrong, or not, but you still tr…

Java as a language is quite boring. Java as an ecosystem is interesting; its tooling, libraries, and business-centric culture are worthy of respect and some thought, even for us rubyistas. Some of the most generic software has been written in Java. In the flexibility vs expressivity spectrum, many Java libraries pick flexibility and it is neat to see how that is accomplished.

Re: Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

#50

Post by metamemetics »

silentbicycle wrote: post #44
astrange wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions. These two sentences have no apparent relation, except that you said they did. Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions. Also, spoken lang…

I think (s)he's saying that human languages have composable, tree-like structures. There's nothing Lisp-specific about that, though. Prolog would work just as well, or ML (human languages may be statically typed), Joy, etc. Also, I'm an amateur linguist at best, but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily.

> but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily.

Sentences yes (figure 7 chunk limit), semantic associations tokened by words, no.

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